Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

This notable shift in readers’ perceptions was in great part due to the wild fad for Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels, which had swept Russia. Pushkin himself, asking his brother to send new books to the country from the capital, admitted, “Walter Scott! It’s food for the soul.”

Pushkin began experimenting with historical fiction: his unfinished The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (about Pushkin’s African ancestor), and then Dubrovsky (also unfinished, about a noble robber, with an obvious bow to the great Scotsman’s Bride of Lammermoor) and “The Captain’s Daughter,” about the adventures of a young officer during the rebellion led by the Cossack Emelyan Pugachev during the reign of Catherine the Great, are clearly modeled on Scott’s “Scottish” novels.

Pushkin hoped that his historical fiction would capture the readers’ slipping attention, “for is not poetry always the pleasure of a small number of the select, while novellas and novels are read by all, everywhere?” But as it often happens, his competitors, incomparably less talented, knew better what the mass audience craved.

Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin (the first “moral-satirical novel” on a Russian theme) sold like hot pirozhki: four thousand copies in three weeks. Zagoskin’s Yuri Miloslavsky, or Russians in 1612, also sold well, even though it cost 20 rubles; it was read “in hotels and workshops, by simple folk and at the royal court,”¹³ and Nicholas I gave the author a ring.

Pushkin wrote great prose that is now the pride of not only Russian but world fiction of the nineteenth century: his novellas The Coffinmaker, The Station Master, and The Queen of Spades paved the way for Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk. But the contemporary press and readers gave Pushkin’s prose a cold shoulder. Pushkin was sure that he wrote “simply, briefly, and clearly” (and entertainingly), while the readers demanded more melodrama, color, plot twists, horrible secrets, and secret horrors.

Pushkin had to face facts: he was no longer the readers’ idol. This filled his heart with bitterness, which was confirmed by hard numbers. Even at the best of times he received a chervonets (10 rubles) per line of verse, while the truly popular Krylov was paid a thousand chervonets for each of his short fables.

Pushkin’s attempts to guarantee himself a stable income (and independence) as a freelance writer failed, as did his later plan to get rich by publishing his own journal, Contemporary.

There was one last way, which suddenly became open thanks to Nicholas’s benevolence: take up the vacant post of state poet (the Zhukovsky model) or state historian (the Karamzin model). Karamzin was dead, Zhukovsky ill and depressed, while Pushkin, inspired by his work on Boris Godunov, felt strong enough to replace both. He had every reason to assume that Karamzin and Zhukovsky saw him as an heir.

It would be wrong to presume that Pushkin’s aspiration to be “counselor to the tsar” was based only on greed or vanity (although D. S. Mirsky in 1934 accused him of being a “lackey” and “vulgar conformist”).¹⁴ That “inspiration is not for sale” Pushkin believed to the end of his days. But the inexorable evolution of his professional and political outlook eventually made him a “liberal conservative,” according to his friend Prince Vyazemsky.

Pushkin still demanded certain freedoms for himself and the elite and still thought the emancipation of the serfs necessary, but by now he firmly believed that these goals could be achieved not by revolutionary means, but through universal education, which could be inculcated in Russia only by the tsar: “Since the Romanov house came to the throne, our government has always been in the forefront of enlightenment. The people follow lazily and sometimes reluctantly.”

The mature Pushkin, despite his French-based education and cosmopolitan orientation, could be called a patriot, even a nationalist, albeit a paradoxical one: “Even though personally I am heartily attached to the Sovereign, I am far from pleased by what I see around me; as a writer, I am irritated, as a man with honor, I am offended, but I swear that I would not want to change my homeland or have another history than the history of our ancestors just as God gave it to us.”

That Pushkin, with that system of views, Nicholas had every reason to call “my Pushkin.” Nevertheless, their differences would have inevitably grown: after all, the tsar was leader of a huge empire, while Pushkin was only one of his fifty million subjects, however much a genius (“the wisest man in Russia”).

Later commentators on the relationship between Nicholas I and Pushkin seem to have forgotten this obvious gap in their respective hierarchical positions. Soviet scholars in particular seemed to think that the sole priority of Nicholas’s reign was to provide ideal conditions for Pushkin’s life and work.

But Nicholas I was not at all like King Ludwig II of Bavaria, for example, who tried to satisfy every whim of Richard Wagner. The Russian emperor was stern and valued subordination to law and order above all.

His exemplar in this was his great-grandfather, Peter the Great, the first ruler in Russia to make serving the state the main criterion for evaluating any person, from emperor to serf. For Nicholas I (as for Peter, too) the army was the model for society: “There we see order, strict unconditional abidance of the law, no know-it-alls or contradictions … I look at human life only as service, for everyone serves.”

In this, Nicholas’s ideological orientation on Peter the Great was obvious to many of his contemporaries, including Pushkin, who in late 1826 wrote an ode to the tsar called “Stanzas” (“In hopes of glory and goodness …”), in which he directly compared the emperor to his legendary ancestor and called on him to follow Peter’s example: “to sow enlightenment” boldly, to be “like him, tireless and hard, / and like him, without rancor” (the latter a hint to Nicholas to show mercy to the Decembrists exiled in Siberia).

The poem, approved by Nicholas and published, cost Pushkin dearly: it finally destroyed his reputation as dissident poet. Many of his friends (but not Zhukovsky) shunned him; behind his back they called him “court toady” (as both Karamzin and Zhukovsky had been called). Nor were the Decembrists, languishing in Siberia, pleased by Pushkin’s verse appeal on their behalf—on the contrary, they thought it “completely dishonorable.”¹⁵

Pushkin’s tragedy was that, having left the liberal camp, he never won the complete trust of conservative circles: the tsar and his court never considered him “one of them.” Pushkin complained that the attitude toward him was “one minute rain, sun the next.”

Nicholas would commission Pushkin to do a special memorandum on national education (a sign of high trust) and have him told that he was reading Eugene Onegin “with great pleasure,” but then he would suggest that he rewrite Boris Godunov as “a historical novella or novel, like Walter Scott” and “clean up” “The Bronze Horseman,” perhaps Pushkin’s greatest work (the author, showing considerable willpower, declined both proposals); sometimes he treated Pushkin in a gentle and friendly manner, and sometimes he “gave me a dressing down,” as the poet put it.

Some commentators tend to see this ambivalent behavior as evidence of Nicholas’s congenital hypocrisy. They interpret the tsar’s talk with Pushkin in the Kremlin on September 8, 1826, as a kind of “contract” that Nicholas violated, thereby “deceiving” the poet.

But Pushkin could never be the emperor’s equal partner. Nicholas viewed his relationship with the poet in a completely different paradigm: the stern but just pedagogue and his talented but unruly student; or, perhaps, the strict parent and his headstrong child (which would later be the relationship between Lenin and Maxim Gorky).

In that paradigm, approval or punishment is determined by the pedagogue/father not within the framework of some nonexistent—and impossible, in that situation—contract, but in response to the behavior of the student/child.

From the point of view of Nicholas, Pushkin’s behavior frequently left much to be desired: parties, cards, women, and blasphemous poems (the infamous “Gabrieliad,” Pushkin’s frivolous satire on the Bible story of the virgin birth).

One can be indignant about Nicholas’s position, but could it have been any different? In decrying the emperor’s treachery, did Pushkin scholars try to see the situation not from Pushkin’s point of view (which they all do) but from Nicholas’s?

Even the outstanding expert on the Pushkin era Yuri Lotman described Nicholas as “untalented, uneducated, and dull … tormentedby uncertainty, suspicious, painfully aware of his mediocrity and terribly envious of bright, merry, and successful people.”¹⁶ Lotman seems to be describing his boss at a state university in Soviet times rather than the autocrat of all Russia, who, as Lotman correctly pointed out elsewhere, was absolutely certain of his divine right to rule.

While understanding that Pushkin was a genius and soberly assessing the political achievements and human qualities of Nicholas I, we must also remember that the main sticking points in these intertwined and uneven relations were their diametrically opposed ideas of what constituted “service.”

This difference imbues “The Bronze Horseman,” Pushkin’s shortest (only 481 lines) but most complex narrative poem, written in 1833. The plot centers on the clash between the poor clerk Yevgeny (Pushkin originally planned him to be a poet) and the famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great by Falconet towering over Senate Square in St. Petersburg. This fantastic confrontation, perhaps a delirious dream, perhaps not, playing out during the terrible flood of 1824, remains the most potent Russian literary symbol of the conflict of the all-powerful state and the defenseless individual.

The flood kills Yevgeny’s bride, and, maddened by grief, he blames her death on Peter, who insisted on erecting his new capital in a treacherous location. Yevgeny, “teeth clenched, fingers in a fist,” threatens the statue: “All right, you miracle-working builder! You’ll get it!”

Suddenly, the statue comes to life: a wrathful Peter on his steed pursues the poor madman through the empty, moonlit streets of St. Petersburg. Yevgeny dies, while the great city created by the emperor still stands, “as steadfast as Russia,” with the Bronze Horseman reigning in its center.

Both Yevgeny and the emperor are in the right, according to Pushkin, and it is up to the reader to decide whose right prevails. This philosophical ambivalence confused and angered its first reader, Nicholas I. For him the answer was obvious—the monarch, the embodiment of the state, was right. He leads the country to greatness, paying no attention to human sacrifices, and the people must obey him—that is, “serve”: that is God’s will.

Nicholas read the manuscript closely and underlined and crossed out many passages. He was particularly outraged by Yevgeny’s threat to Peter. Pushkin was ordered to change the poem in accordance with Nicholas’s ideas, and the poet accepted some of them, but he refused to eliminate the challenge to the mighty ruler from his wretched subject: “All right, you miracle-working builder! You’ll get it!”

For Pushkin, this passage was the poem’s climax (which Nicholas seemed to intuit). Pushkin preferred to leave “The Bronze Horseman” in his desk drawer, where it lay until his death, first appearing in a mutilated form in April 1837. Ever since, the poem has remained at the center of Russia’s continuing debate over which is more crucial: the power and majesty of the state, or the rights and happiness of the individual? And how to compare the achievements of the national leader and those of the national poet? Which is more important for history and the country’s self-image?

. . .

Karamzin as author of the History of the Russian State, which Pushkin called “not only the creation of a great writer but the exploit of an honest man,” was Pushkin’s model of how a poet should serve the state.

The reference to “an honest man” underscores Pushkin’s conditions for his collaboration with the state, in which his concept of honor must not be threatened. He liked Karamzin’s aphorism “Il ne faut pas qu’un honnête homme mérite d’être pendu” (“An honest man does not deserve hanging”). In 1831 he wrote to Alexander Benckendorff, chief of the Third Department of the Imperial Chancellery (overseeing state security) and official intermediary between Pushkin and Nicholas, that he wanted to do “historical research in our state archives and libraries. I do not dare nor wish to take on the title of historian after the unforgettable Karamzin; but I can with time fulfill my long-held desire to write the History of Peter the Great and his heirs.”

Nicholas approved the ambitious application from the poet still considered politically unreliable. Soon afterward, Pushkin was able to tell a friend, “The tsar (between us) has taken me into service, i.e., given me a salary and permission to dig in the archives to compile a History of Peter I. Long live the tsar!”

Suddenly setting aside the promised history of Peter the Great, Pushkin rather quickly wrote “The History of Pugachev,” based on classified materials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The topic was still too hot—it wasn’t even sixty years since the bloody uprising of Cossacks and peasants led by Pugachev had been suppressed ruthlessly, shocking Russia in the reign of Catherine the Great, and some witnesses of the events were still around. Therefore Pushkin presented the completed manuscript for Nicholas’s examination with trepidation.

Contrary to expectations, the emperor was satisfied and made only a few corrections (which Pushkin characterized as to the point)—for example, revising the manuscript’s title, “The History of the Pugachev Rebellion.”

Moreover, Nicholas ordered that the state printing press publish the book, thus giving the author a chance to earn some 30,000 rubles, Pushkin calculated, and “live the sweet life.” (The book, however, was a flop.)

As for the history of Peter the Great, Pushkin continued working on it intermittently until his death, but he left nothing but two dozen notebooks with notes and extracts from numerous documents and books. Nicholas read that manuscript, too, after the poet’s death, and at first did not recommend it for publication, but finally agreed with Zhukovsky’s arguments that it should be printed. Still, no publisher for this project was found. Pushkin’s manuscript was returned to the poet’s widow, and the tsar hired a professional historian for a book about Peter I.

In 1831, Pushkin married a Moscow beauty from a once wealthy but now bankrupt family, the eighteen-year-old Natalie Goncharova. The tsar was pleased that “his” Pushkin was settling down. Pushkin seemed happy. They had children: between 1832 and 1836 two girls and two boys. There were no signs that this marriage would start a chain of events that would lead to the poet’s tragic death.

There is no more famous mythos in Russian culture than the story of Pushkin’s marriage, duel, and death. Many books and innumerable articles have appeared on the subject, presenting starkly different interpretations. The more we learn of the events, the more inexplicable they seem.

Here is a brief summary. The marriage sharply exacerbated Pushkin’s chronic lack of funds; he always lived beyond his means and gambled at cards, as well. He had hoped to improve his financial affairs by publishing Contemporary magazine. He knew that a general-interest magazine could be profitable—the popular monthly Library for Reading, with its seven thousand subscribers paying 50 rubles annually, made the publisher Senkovsky a wealthy man.

Pushkin managed to put out four issues of Contemporary. It was a quality journal, but too serious for the audience Pushkin hoped to attract. Its rivals called it elitist and the circulation fell continually, destroying Pushkin’s fantasy of a way out of his financial dead end.

Nicholas I became Pushkin’s major benefactor: he gave the poet two loans (totaling 50,000 rubles).¹⁷ All around, at the end of his life Pushkin owed a vast amount of money: around 140,000 rubles.¹⁸

This made his position very vulnerable in late 1833 when Nicholas granted him the court title of gentleman of the chamber, with required attendance at court ceremonies and balls. This was the lowest court title, formally in strict accordance with Pushkin’s low civil rank. The vain poet was furious.

Zhukovsky barely restrained his impulsive friend (literally pouring cold water on him) from “speaking rudely” with Nicholas himself. The irony is that Pushkin brought upon himself the appointment that he felt was so incommensurate with his achievements and therefore so humiliating.

Once Natalie was taken to a court party without Pushkin’s knowledge, and she pleased the empress very much. Angry, Pushkin declared, “I do not wish my wife to go where I do not go.” A contemporary reported, “His words were passed along, and Pushkin was made a gentleman of the chamber.”

Pushkin tried to retire, but his desire contradicted Nicholas’s fundamental belief in service for everyone. Avoiding service made a man suspect. The emperor threatened to take away Pushkin’s salary and end his access to the archives. This would have made further work as a state historian impossible and imperiled his livelihood. Pushkin had to give in.

There was one more point: Pushkin thought (or needed to think) that Natalie’s beauty was so overwhelming that even the emperor could not resist her. The poet thought the court title was forced on him so that Nicholas could see Natalie at court balls.

In a letter dated October 11, 1833, he warned his wife, “Don’t flirt with the tsar.” And a few weeks later, “You’re happy that dogs run after you like a bitch, their tails erect and sniffing your ass; a fine thing to be happy about! … Alas, that’s the whole secret of coquetry: as long as there’s a trough, pigs will come.”

Pushkin bitterly complained to a friend that Nicholas “courted his wife like a lousy officer; having his carriage pass under her windows several times in the morning, and in the evening, at balls, asking why her blinds were always shut.” Pushkin could learn this only from Natalie—was she trying to make him jealous? (In 1848, more than eleven years after Pushkin’s death, the emperor recalled during a dinner conversation how Pushkin spoke with him three days before the fatal duel: “I confess sincerely, that I suspected even you of courting my wife.”) The poet Anna Akhmatova, a great connoisseur of the Pushkin era and of human psychology, blamed Natalie for boasting about her conquests to Pushkin; Akhmatova felt this led to the catastrophe that ensued.

Pushkin was an insanely jealous man. Did he have any reason to suspect Nicholas of improper intentions? In the Soviet era, many historians said yes, stressing the emperor’s supposed “vile lust,” even though the most cynical contemporaries never presumed that the emperor’s attention to Pushkin’s wife was anything but innocent flirtation.

The final tragedy was not caused by Nicholas; however, without meaning to, he helped set the scene. Balls in St. Petersburg really were the place where numerous love affairs began, often ending in social scandals and sometimes in tragedy.

At a ball in 1835 or early 1836, Georges D’Anthès met Natalie Pushkin and apparently fell madly in love with her. He was a young cavalry officer, a French émigré and adopted son of Baron Jacob Burchard van Heeckeren, the Dutch ambassador. The tall, blond, and handsome D’Anthès cut a dashing social figure, and his attraction to Natalie soon was noticed. She was flattered, and enjoyed telling her husband about him.

This was a mistake. Pushkin was agitated, and only a spark was needed to set him off. That spark was an anonymous letter, which Pushkin and several of his friends received, bestowing a “diploma of cuckolds” upon him, implying that Natalie had succumbed to D’Anthès (which Pushkin considered a lie).

Pushkin challenged D’Anthès to a duel. Zhukovsky, terrified, managed to settle the affair: he told Nicholas, who then invited Pushkin to an audience, an extraordinary gesture. This conversation, unlike their meeting in the Kremlin in 1826, was not publicized; the topic was quite sensitive. The outcome was this: Nicholas made Pushkin give his word that he would not fight a duel (they were officially banned), and if new complications were to arise, he would promise to appeal to the tsar.

Pushkin was always proud of his noble ancestry and of being a man of honor, but he did not keep his word. On January 25, 1837, he sent an insulting letter to Baron Heeckeren in order to provoke a duel with his son.

The duel took place on January 27 at five in the evening outside St. Petersburg. Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later, after receiving the final rites, in terrible suffering, at the age of thirty-seven. His last words were “It’s hard to breathe, I’m suffocating.”

The night after the duel, Pushkin sent word to the tsar that he was sorry for not keeping his word. In response, the emperor sent a note: “If God does not allow us to meet in this world, I send you my forgiveness and last advice: die a Christian. Do not worry about your wife and children: I will take care of them.”²¹

In fact, Nicholas paid all the late poet’s debts, assigned a pension to the widow and daughters and a special stipend for the sons, and ordered the publication, at state expense, of a collection of Pushkin’s works to benefit his family.

These were all signs of special attention (comparable to those given to Karamzin’s family after the historian’s death), and they stunned contemporaries: one courtier noted, “This is wonderful, but it’s too much.”²²

Only insiders knew that Nicholas rejected Zhukovsky’s request to accompany the financial generosity with a special imperial rescript. One was published upon Karamzin’s death, reiterating the official recognition of his outstanding achievements for the state. The tsar told Zhukovsky, “Listen, brother, I’ve done everything I can for Pushkin, but I won’t write the way I did for Karamzin; we barely forced Pushkin to die like a Christian, while Karamzin lived and died like an angel.”

Unexpectedly, Pushkin’s death incited a wave of nationalist emotions in St. Petersburg. Crowds gathered outside his apartment; according to Zhukovsky, some ten thousand people paid their respects to his body laid out in a coffin—a huge number for those days. Foreign ambassadors reported in their dispatches of a new “Russian Party,” and calls for “hanging foreigners.”

No less surprised than the ambassadors was Nicholas. On his orders, measures were taken to keep Pushkin’s funeral from turning into an opposition political demonstration: he had not gotten over the shock of the Decembrist rebellion of 1825.

The planned funeral service in St. Isaac’s Cathedral was moved to a small church, the coffin delivered at night, under police escort. From there, still under police guard, the body was hastily moved to the Svyatogorsk Monastery, not far from Pushkin’s family estate in Pskov Province.

A St. Petersburg newspaper printed a small obituary: “The sun of poetry has set! Pushkin passed away, in his prime, in the midst of his great life work!” The next day the editor was called on the carpet by the chairman of the capital’s censorship committee, who demanded, “Why this publication about Pushkin? Why such honor? Was Pushkin a military leader, a minister, a statesman? Writing little verses does not yet mean a great life work.”

The editor was told that the criticism came from Sergei Uvarov, minister of education. But behind that strict reprimand loomed the regal figure of Nicholas I.

PART III

CHAPTER 7

Lermontov and Briullov

The Pushkin mythos began to form while he was still alive. In the fall of 1833 he wrote to his wife in St. Petersburg from his family estate, “Do you know what the neighbors say about me? Here’s how they gossip about me working: How Pushkin writes poetry—he has a decanter of the finest liqueur before him—he downs a glass, another, a third—and starts writing! That’s fame, dear.”

The poet as drunkard and libertine: that was one of the most popular images of the creative figure then, harkening to the Barkov tradition and entrenched among the general public, as well as the elite. Baron Modest Korff, who had studied with Pushkin at the Lycée and knew him well, was a high official and confidant of Nicholas I, and he described the poet this way: “Always without a kopeck, always in debt, sometimes even without a decent tail coat, endlessly in trouble, frequently dueling, closely acquainted with all the inn keepers, whores and wenches, Pushkin represented a person of the filthiest depravity.”¹

Such a tirade about Karamzin or Zhukovsky was impossible: they were “angels.” That was also a legend, of course, and like any legend it was created by people. One of the authors of the posthumous image of Karamzin was Zhukovsky himself.

With Pushkin dead, Zhukovsky attempted to create a new image for him, too. He wrote two “historic” letters about Pushkin with that in mind. One, dated February 15, 1837, was addressed to the poet’s father, but actually intended for wide distribution; accordingly, it was printed in Contemporary soon after.

Zhukovsky’s other letter, written at the same time, was also planned as a historical document. It was to chief of the gendarmes Benckendorff, who had supervised Pushkin on Nicholas’s command.

These letters initiated a radical transformation of Pushkin’s image. Any memory of the dissipated, hard-drinking, freethinking poet had to be erased. In its stead, Zhukovsky offered a new concept of Pushkin: the national genius, true Christian, and loyal subject of the tsar, who sent a message to Nicholas from his deathbed, “I hate to die; I would be all His.”²

These letters belong to Zhukovsky’s highest creative achievements. He accomplished his intricate mission of changing public opinion of Pushkin with great care, choosing precisely the right words—his Pushkin dies “with a calm expression” and “radiant thoughts,” surrounded by a pious crowd of mourners, and is transfigured by death: “there was something striking in his immobility, amidst that movement, and something touching and mysterious in that prayer that could be heard amidst the noise.”³

This new Christian image of Pushkin was not cut from whole cloth. In going through Pushkin’s papers on the tsar’s orders (and in the presence of a vigilant gendarme general), Zhukovsky discovered not only the unpublished “Bronze Horseman” and another masterpiece, his testament-like “The Monument” (after Horace), but also a cycle of poems on biblical themes, known to no one; Zhukovsky was particularly struck by the verse transposition of St. Efraim of Syria’s prayer for Great Lent, “Lord and Master of my life …”

The poem, probably written a few months before Pushkin’s death, was so sincere and powerful that Zhukovsky took it to Nicholas, who was also quite moved by it. The empress asked for a copy of Pushkin’s prayer for herself.

This “new, improved” Pushkin—a firm Christian and faithful servant of the Sovereign, carefully presented by Zhukovsky—proved to be an extremely successful construct, surviving eighty years, until the revolution of 1917. In the Soviet era this image of Pushkin was, of course, rejected and replaced with just the opposite—Pushkin as flaming atheist and revolutionary. But the old image rose once again from the ashes, like the Phoenix, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, by now lasting longer than some of Zhukovsky’s best poems.

Nicholas found Zhukovsky’s image of Pushkin as an Orthodox national poet and monarchist attractive also because it fit the new ideological formula “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” conceived by his minister of national education Sergei Uvarov and approved by the monarch in 1833 as the state doctrine.

Historians point out that Uvarov (a liberal in his youth, a friend of Pushkin’s, who had reoriented himself and made a brilliant career under Nicholas) created the triad as a polemical response to the slogan of the French Revolution—“Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”—using a Russian military battle cry during the war with Napoleon: “For Faith, Tsar, and Homeland!”⁴

Minister Uvarov was a smart and cynical man. In 1835 a subordinate recorded in his diary Uvarov’s political and cultural credo: “We, that is, people of the nineteenth century, are in a difficult position: we live among political storms and turbulence. People are changing their way of life and themselves, agitating, moving forward. But Russia is still young, virginal, and must not taste, at least not yet, these bloody troubles. We must continue her youth and in the meantime educate her.”⁵

Nicholas I’s policies (as were those of almost every Russian ruler after him, to the present day) were intended to maintain the country’s cultural “innocence” for as long as possible. At some point the emperor decided that Pushkin, much more suitable as the instrument of cultural manipulation now that he was dead, could be used for this purpose. That is why the tsar eventually approved the legend that Zhukovsky created. There was, however, a subversive element in the legend.

The oppositionist aspect of Pushkin’s posthumous image was also formulated by the clever Zhukovsky, in the letter to Benckendorff: “Russia’s first poet” fell “victim of a foreign libertine,” who was outrageously shielded by the government and police.

Zhukovsky’s description of the great poet as victim of the intrigues and hypocrisy of the upper circles was directly influenced by a poem that circulated throughout Russia right after Pushkin’s death, written by an unknown twenty-two-year-old Hussar, Mikhail Lermontov.

The effect of his poem, “The Death of a Poet,” was an illustration of the clichéd story of the young genius who wakes up famous one day. Brought up by a wealthy grandmother, Lermontov started writing at fourteen and at sixteen noted, “I am either God or no one!” He had written about three hundred poems before “The Death of a Poet”—that is, almost three-fourths of his lyric output—and also twenty-four epic poems and five dramas. But by 1837 only one poem and one epic poem had been published, both attracting little notice.

But “The Death of a Poet” stunned contemporaries, one of whom later recalled, “I doubt that a poem in Russia ever had such a huge and universal effect.”⁶ Lermontov spoke out against Pushkin’s persecutors passionately and powerfully:

You, greedily crowded around the throne,

Executioners of Freedom, Genius, and Glory!

You hide behind the law,

The justice and truth must be silent!

There is so much bitterness and anger in the poem that we tend to forget that Lermontov began writing it the minute he heard of the duel and finished his verse obituary (the first fifty-six lines) while Pushkin was still alive—he was in such a hurry to express his emotions.

“The Death of a Poet” was Lermontov’s “graveside homily and simultaneously his throne speech,”⁷ with thousands of copies flooding St. Petersburg. Lermontov was immediately declared Pushkin’s heir, and, inspired by the sudden fame, he wrote the last sixteen lines, ending with the famous words:

And you will not be able to wash away with your black blood The Poet’s righteous blood!

A copy of the poem, with someone’s caption “Call to Revolution,” was immediately brought to Nicholas. At the same time, the emperor received a denunciation from Count Benckendorff: “This poem is insolent and its ending is shameless free-thinking, more than criminal.”⁸

Nicholas irritably minuted in response, “Fine poem, I must say … For now I have commanded the senior medic of the guards corps to visit this gentleman and determine if he is mad; and then we will deal with him in accordance with the law.”⁹

As punishment for his “seditious” poem, Lermontov was sent to the army in the Caucasus, where a war continued between Russian troops and intransigent mountain tribes. (He was soon returned to St. Petersburg through the efforts of his influential grandmother.)

Lermontov’s reputation as the reincarnation of Pushkin was thereby entrenched, which was a paradox, for his creative credo was rather anti-Pushkin in its radical Romanticism, darkened by ennui and wild passions.

Even more curious was the beneficent attention that some of his works—for example, his blasphemous narrative poem “The Demon” (about the fatal love of a fallen cherubim for a mortal woman and his battle with God over her soul), not published in his lifetime—received in the salon of Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, Nicholas’s wife. (More understandable is why the deeply religious empress copied lines from Lermontov’s touching “Prayer” into her diary when she mourned her father’s death.)¹⁰

According to Lermontov, Nicholas learned that he wrote poetry when he was still at the military school (Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas’s brother, was head of the school) and in all probability kept an eye on his work. This is what the emperor had to say about “The Demon”: “The poem is undoubtedly good, but its subject matter is not particularly pleasant.” (Later Anton Rubinstein based his 1871 opera, which is still hugely popular in Russia, on the poem.)

By far more notorious was Nicholas’s reaction to A Hero of Our Times, Lermontov’s prose masterpiece, published in St. Petersburg in 1840.

The novel is actually a chain of short stories united by a single hero: Pechorin, an officer and self-absorbed cynic who flaunts his immorality. Pechorin is the literary younger brother of Pushkin’s Onegin and precursor of Russian literature’s “superfluous man.” For Lermontov, he is the hero of our times, but Nicholas was attracted to another character in the novel: Captain Maxim Maximych, a veteran of the war in the Caucasus, a simple soldier with a mustache of silver and a heart of gold.

Nicholas read A Hero of Our Times on board the ship that brought him from Germany to Russia in June 1840. On his travels, he wrote letters to his wife, who remained in Germany for treatment. In one letter (written in French), he said that he found the novel “well written,” but from the ethical point of view deserving strong condemnation:

Such novels ruin the mores and coarsen the character. And even though you read those feline sighs with revulsion, they still have a morbid effect, because you eventually get used to believing that the whole world consists only of such people, who even when they perform apparently good deeds act only out of vile and filthy considerations. What kind of a result can that yield? Scorn or hatred of humanity! But is that the goal of our existence on earth? People are too inclined as it is to become hypochondriacs or misanthropes, so why prompt or encourage such tendencies with this kind of writing?¹¹

Nicholas finds Captain Maxim Maximych incomparably more worthy than the egocentric Pechorin: “The captain’s character is sketched successfully. As I began the novella, I hoped and was heartened to think that he would be the hero of our days … However the captain appears in this work only as a hope that is finally unrealized, and M. Lermontov did not manage to follow that noble and simple character.”¹²

Paradoxically, Nicholas’s point of view triumphed in Stalin’s day, when it was declared that Lermontov, by then firmly established in the national pantheon, “condemns Pechorin’s egotistical character, his narrow individualism, which is juxtaposed in the novel to the humanity and simple-heartedness of Maxim Maximych.”¹³ Thus, Nicholas I extended his hand across a century to Soviet Lermontov specialists.

At the same time, those specialists accused the emperor of allegedly personally organizing the poet’s death. Although many mysteries remain in Lermontov’s brief life (he died at twenty-six), the known facts do not support this conspiracy theory.

Lermontov was ugly—short, bowlegged, with a large head and small (but expressive) eyes. He was morbidly vain and incredibly volatile. (Pushkin was a saint compared to Lermontov.) That mix was a surefire recipe for catastrophe.

The military habit of solving all sorts of conflicts with a duel must have been in Lermontov’s blood. He was always living dangerously: it suited his character and his idea of a Romantic poet. For his duel with the son of the French ambassador over a woman, Nicholas had Lermontov exiled to the Caucasus again, where he argued with an old school friend, also an officer, and was killed in a duel in 1841.

The death of the young poet, who had written for only thirteen years and had accomplished so much in such a short time (and promised so much more), stunned Russian readers. Against the background of universal mourning, Nicholas’s crude epitaph, recorded by several memoirists, stood out: “A dog’s death for a dog!” (Or, in a milder version that was still outrageous: “Serves him right.”)¹⁴

This ugly remark was explained by the historian Peter Bartenev in 1911. According to Bartenev, Nicholas said it at tea, in a family setting, right after receiving word of the fatal duel, and elicited a “bitter rebuke” from his elder sister, Maria. After that reaction from his family, the emperor went out to meet his courtiers with a completely different statement: “Gentlemen, I have received word that the one who could have replaced Pushkin has been killed.”¹⁵

In the family circle, Nicholas, who considered Lermontov, like Pushkin, a good poet but a bad person (and an even worse servant), could have barked out a remark with soldierly directness. But outside that room, he spoke as politician, head of state, and father of the nation.

As a man, Nicholas could have been outraged by Lermontov’s inglorious death (as he saw it), especially since dueling had been banned by the emperor and was punished severely. But Nicholas also understood that Lermontov’s death, like Pushkin’s four years earlier, would not add any glory to his reign. His final words were damage control.

Much more humane was the simple and sincere response from the empress, who wrote to a friend, “A sigh for Lermontov and his broken lyre that had promised Russian literature to become its leading star.”¹⁶

Before his final departure for the Caucasus, Lermontov and a friend dropped in on the German fortune-teller who lived in St. Petersburg and was famous for having told Pushkin that he would be killed over a woman at the age of thirty-seven by a tall, blond man.

Knowing that her prediction had come to pass, Lermontov asked her about his fate: would the tsar allow him to retire? Would he return to St. Petersburg? People said that “the answer was that he would never be in St. Petersburg again, nor be retired from service, but that another retirement awaited him, ‘after which you will not ask anyone for anything.’ ”

Were these predictions legends or fact? At the very least they were characteristic of the atmosphere around the great poets. In their lifetime, but especially after their deaths, both Pushkin and Lermontov were turned into Romantic figures, surrounded by rumors, gossip, and posthumous legends.

A Romantic hero had to have a commensurate appearance. Lermontov’s eyes, like those of an unattractive woman, became the feature most mentioned; allegedly they were mesmerizing, with pupils that started moving quickly, “like an animal’s,” in moments of agitation. It was said that only the famous painter Karl Briullov could depict Lermontov properly, “since he painted not portraits, but gazes, putting fire in the eye.”

Briullov was the most celebrated Russian painter of the era, the only one to have achieved real success even in Europe, where his 1833 masterpiece The Last Day of Pompeii was a hit. He was, like Lermontov, not tall, with a big head and broad shoulders, but he had the face of Apollo, framed by luxuriant hair.

Like Lermontov, Briullov was a man out of Romantic legend, the personification of the idea expressed by the mad poet Konstantin Batyushkov: “Live as you write, and write as you live.”¹⁷ When he was seducing women, Briullov would tell them, “Don’t you know that every person is a novel, and what a novel! But God spare you from looking into my novel!—There are such black pages in it that they would soil your pretty little fingers.”¹⁸

When Briullov exhibited The Last Day of Pompeii at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, the enormous canvas that depicted with operatic melodrama a terrifying moment of natural cataclysm, a volcano spilling its lava on the ancient Roman city, captured the imagination of the northern capital, from ordinary folk to the emperor.

Anatole Demidov, a wealthy Russian who lived in Europe, had commissioned the painting and paid 40,000 francs for it; he presented it to Nicholas I, who “graced this gift with his magnanimous acceptance” and awarded Briullov the Order of St. Anna, Third Degree. The tsar summoned Briullov from Europe and appointed him as a professor at the academy. That moment began the unprecedented relationship between Nicholas and the painter.

The Imperial Academy of Arts was closely supervised by Nicholas I. He not only appointed and fired directors and teachers, he controlled the curricula, student competitions, and all commissions, observing their execution and giving “advice” (read: commands) on what to improve in a painting, sculpture, or architectural project. He considered himself a particular expert in battle and historical painting (he wasn’t bad at drawing).

Founded in 1757 by Empress Elizabeth I, in 1850 the academy was moved to Nicholas’s Ministry of the Imperial Court, and he turned it into a bureaucratic institution that functioned in strict accordance with the official Table of Ranks. Artists were given ranks equal to civil servants, with quasimilitary discipline and a detailed system of rewards and punishments.

At first this concept had a rational element: it helped turn Russian artists into respected members of society by putting order into their rise up the state ladder. But naturally, there was a danger that soon manifested itself: dressed in impressive uniforms with gold braid and medals and orders, artists began to feel like officials, with diminishing creative results. Among these obedient and cautious bureaucrats with palettes and brushes, Briullov was like a “lawless comet” in the gray St. Petersburg sky.

Yes, Nicholas valued talent, but he valued order, discipline, and zeal even more. The emperor hated indolence, drunkenness, and negligence in Russian artists, according to reminiscences of contemporaries. To everyone’s horror, Briullov worked only when the mood struck him and periodically went on legendary drunken benders; even though he was a professor at the academy he somehow managed to never wear the uniform—not even on formal occasions—and his behavior should have outraged the emperor. But no. Something about the “great Karl” fascinated Nicholas, who forgave Briullov’s romantic peccadilloes that would have been unthinkable for anyone else.

Everyone in Russia tried to be in the tsar’s good graces, but not Briullov. In that sense, the artist was even more independent than Pushkin, who had also showed the tsar his lion’s claws from time to time.

Examples of Briullov’s affronts are numerous, each more colorful than the last. Nicholas visited his studio unexpectedly, and the artist refused to come out: he was not well, he claimed. Nicholas ordered a series of paintings depicting his Guards regiments on parade, but the artist replied that he did not know how to paint parades and would not do it. Briullov also rejected the tsar’s pet idea for a historical painting—Ivan the Terrible praying with his wife in a peasant hut during the taking of Kazan.

It got worse. Briullov did everything he could to avoid the most desirable commission possible—portraits of Nicholas and his family. In the summer of 1837, Nicholas invited the artist to his summer residence in Peterhof, where Briullov began a double portrait on horseback of the empress and her daughter. He painted sitting by the window in a garden pavilion, while the royal riders posed outside.

A downpour began. The court physician, worried about the empress’s frail health, tried to stop the session, but she refused: “Don’t bother him while he is working!” The empress and her daughter were soaked to the skin. On that occasion, Briullov played the role of enraptured genius to the hilt, but he never did complete the portrait.

Once, Briullov was summoned to the Winter Palace to paint another daughter of the tsar. Nicholas came in during the session and as usual made suggestions. The painter put down his brush. “I can’t continue, my hand is trembling with fear.” The contemporary who noted Briullov’s reply added, “Artists will understand the mockery, but I don’t know whether or not the emperor did.”¹⁹

Of course Nicholas did, but he pretended not to be offended. He wanted a portrait by Briullov as a necessary attribute of imperial majesty. But even his own portrait created a problem. The tsar informed Briullov that he would come to his studio to pose, and then was twenty minutes late. When he arrived, Nicholas was told by Briullov’s terrified apprentice that the artist “expected Your Majesty, but knowing that you are never late, thought that you had canceled the session.”

The perplexed Nicholas left Briullov’s studio, murmuring, “What an impatient man!”²⁰ Work on the portrait ended before it began.

Briullov positioned himself as a Romantic and, therefore, free figure. “It was easier for him to anger the Sovereign and bear his wrath than to paint his portrait,” a contemporary noted. But there was an area where the tastes and preferences of the artist and tsar coincided: erotic art.

Nicholas liked pictures of buxom, voluptuous women. Briullov was a specialist of that genre. His early work Italian Morning, depicting a beauty with bared breasts, ended up in the imperial family’s private collection. Nicholas was so pleased with it that he commissioned a painting in pendant, in the same spirit. So Italian Noon, slightly less erotic but no less tempting, came to be.

Nicholas thought himself a moral person. His treatment of his wife was markedly courtly. (She was his first woman.) But that did not keep him from enjoying his enormous collection of erotic drawings, which experts acquired for him all over Europe; he also had a good collection of medieval chastity belts.²¹

Briullov’s painting Bacchanalia, which had belonged to Nicholas, has survived. It was kept in a special frame with a lock and covered by a lithograph. When it was unlocked, Briullov’s painting appeared: a depiction of the Bacchae in a love scene with satyrs and an ass, a traditional erotic motif.

This may be one of the reasons for Nicholas’s indulgent attitude toward Briullov. His education, etiquette, and Christian morality demanded strict behavior of the emperor. Art and artists opened a window into another beckoning world.

All of St. Petersburg gossiped about the love affairs of fashionable artists. Orest Kiprensky, author of perhaps the best portrait of Pushkin (1827) and drawing teacher of Grand Duke Mikhail, was rumored to have murdered his Roman mistress and model. A long trail of colorful stories followed another prominent artist of the period, the Pole Alexander Orlovsky, a favorite of Grand Duke Konstantin: as a youth he had participated in the Polish uprising against Catherine II, then traveled around Europe with an Italian circus, and supposedly lived a life of drunkenness and revelry.

Settled in St. Petersburg with his French wife, who owned the capital’s zoo, Orlovsky became a master of lithography (taking pride in having introduced the technique to Russia). One of Orlovsky’s friends was Pushkin, who mentioned the artist in a frivolous fairy-tale poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820): “Take up your quick pencil, / Orlovsky, draw the night and battle.” But what “nocturnal battle” did Pushkin have in mind?

Orlovsky’s album of erotic drawings, dating to 1810–1821, was reproduced for the first time in Russia in 1991: a penis taking a walk, observed by a lovely lady; a caricature of an official with a phallus for a face; and so on. This made previously secret aspects of Orlovsky’s scandalous popularity more obvious.²²

Briullov’s love affairs were also the subject of much talk (a young Frenchwoman drowned herself in the Tiber over him). But most of the gossip was over his family drama. At the age of thirty-nine he married the eighteen-year-old beauty Emilia Timm, daughter of Riga’s burgomaster, and on the eve of the wedding learned from her that she was in an incestuous relationship with her father. Nevertheless, Briullov and Emilia wed, but according to the artist, her affair with her father continued.

Briullov applied for a divorce. Learning that Nicholas had taken a personal interest in the case, Briullov wrote an explanatory letter to Count Benckendorff: “The girl’s parents and their friends have slandered me in public, giving as the reason for the divorce a completely different circumstance, an alleged argument, which never happened, between me and her father while drinking champagne, as if I were a drunkard.”²³ (Briullov’s love of wine was no secret. Even Gogol, his devoted admirer, called the artist a “well-known drunk” in a letter to a friend.)

It was very hard to astonish St. Petersburg with excessive drinking: it was the natural attribute of the creative personality, since the legendary times of Lomonosov and Barkov. But incest was another matter, adding spice to the divorce case, and transforming it into a “story.”

Lermontov explained what that meant in his unfinished novel about high-society life, Princess Ligovskaya: “O! A story is a terrible thing; whether you behaved nobly or vilely, are right or not, could have avoided it or not, but if your name is mixed up in a story, you lose everything: the approval of society, career, respect of friends … Being caught up in a story! There can be nothing worse, no matter how the story ends!”

After Nicholas’s intervention, Briullov was granted his divorce almost immediately: it was decided that “relations between spouses were extremely sad” and “neither trying church repentance nor living apart for several months can bring about reconciliation.” But disapproving glances from high society followed Briullov for a long time.

An interesting phenomenon in Nicholas’s strict era was the allure of erotic poetry. Like nineteenth-century Russian erotic drawings, it had its roots in French erotic verse and lithographs.

Ivan Barkov, the scandalous poet of Catherine’s day who wrote obscene odes, ballads, and epigrams that circulated in innumerable copies, intrigued Pushkin. Pushkin as a great master of erotic poetry was a topic that in Russia was practically banned for a long time, and even now they try to tiptoe around it: the authorities still believe that writing about it would demean the image of the country’s greatest poet.

Yet the erotic line was always important for Pushkin. People sometimes forget that Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, which is now studied in schools, was considered indecent in its day.

The seriously obscene ballad “Barkov’s Shadow,” which specialists today almost unanimously ascribe to Pushkin, was not published in Russia until 1991—that is, after the collapse of the Soviet regime. In it, the defrocked priest Ebakov (“Fuckov”) is visited by the ghost of Barkov, who gives him fantastic sexual powers in exchange for the promise to praise Barkov everywhere.

“Barkov’s Shadow,” a dirty joke delivered with a non-Barkovian light touch, was a literary lampoon attacking Pushkin’s poetic opponents, who are thwarted by the towering figure of the legendary Barkov,

With lowered pants,

With fat prick in hand,

With sagging balls …

In this dangerous genre, which requires considerable panache and at the same time self-control to succeed, Pushkin had also a good teacher in the family: his uncle Vassily Pushkin (1766–1830), author of the frivolous poetic masterpiece “Dangerous Neighbor,” a hilarious tale of debauchery in a Moscow bordello.

Vassily Pushkin has two buxom whores whiling away the time between clients by reading the works of the author’s literary foe: “A real talent will find admirers everywhere!” This sarcastic line became popular. (“Dangerous Neighbor” fared better in Soviet times than “Barkov’s Shadow”—it was published several times, perhaps because Lenin once approvingly quoted a line from Vassily Pushkin.)

Young Pushkin’s erotic masterpiece was the narrative poem “The Gabrieliad,” written in 1821, when he wasn’t yet twenty-two. It does not contain a single vulgarity, which makes it all the more alluring. Its offense comes from the blasphemous plot, a parody of the Annunciation: the holy Mary gives herself “in the same day to Satan, archangel, and God.”

The poem, like many of its ilk, was circulated widely in anonymous handwritten, samizdat copies. It was forbidden fruit twice over, being both erotic and profane. The thunder struck in 1828 when the serfs of a retired officer reported to the metropolitan of St. Petersburg that their master read them a “blasphemous poem,” which turned out to be “The Gabrieliad.”

The case reached Nicholas, who inquired whether Pushkin was the author of those sacrilegious verses. Pushkin denied it at first, maintaining that “not in one of my works, even those of which I most repent, is there a trace of sacrilege.” But in the end, the poet tried repeating the gambit that he had played two years earlier in his historic conversation with Nicholas at the Kremlin: in a personal letter to the tsar he admitted his authorship. After that Nicholas stopped further investigation: “The case is known to me in detail and completely closed.”

As the French ambassador perceptively wrote of Nicholas, “He is appreciative of those who trust him and is hurt when he is not trusted … Inspiring fear and respect in those around him, he is at the same time a reliable friend and in his heartfelt tenderness often resembles a romantic young woman, although sometimes along with that feeling he displays incredible severity and implacability at the slightest mistake on someone’s part.”²⁴

It was this somewhat mystifying duality that made Nicholas I so terrifyingly unpredictable (like Stalin later). Just a little more than a month after the audience he granted Pushkin in Moscow on September 8, 1826, which was so favorable for the dissident poet, Nicholas subjected another poet in Moscow to a harsh interrogation with tragic results.

The night of July 28 the young Alexander Polezhaev, a recent graduate of Moscow University and author of the poem “Sashka,” a satirical and very licentious imitation of the recently published first chapter of Eugene Onegin, was brought to the palace. That nocturnal summons (in fact, an arrest) was the result of an informant’s report to Nicholas that students at Moscow University were lewd drunkards, full of dangerous ideas. As an illustration, a manuscript copy of “Sashka” was appended.

Polezhaev’s poem, still printed only with cuts in Russia, is a bizarre example of Russian Romanticism, combining openly dissident statements (“Oppressing minds with chains, my stupid Homeland!”) with outright obscenity: “Flee, sadness and sorrows, into your fucking mother’s cunt! We haven’t fucked for such a long time / in such divine company!”

It has been said that Russians take every romantic idea to its extreme by trying to realize it in real life. This certainly holds true for Polezhaev’s strange fate. His life was changed irreversibly in 1826 by his encounter with Nicholas. The emperor commanded the poet to read his poem aloud. “I will show you what young men are studying at the university,” the tsar said to the minister of education, standing there, white with fear.

When the reading was over, Nicholas addressed the minister again: “What do you have to say? I will put an end to this libertinism, I will root it out!” He turned to Polezhaev: “You need to be punished as an example to others.”

Polezhaev was drafted as a soldier and sent with the infantry to the Caucasus, where he spent almost four years fighting in Chechnya and Dagestan, while continuing to write poetry.

In the fall of 1837, eleven years after that meeting with the emperor, Polezhaev died in a military hospital in Moscow, exhausted by tuberculosis and alcoholism. Alexander Herzen described what happened to the poet’s body in his book of memoirs, My Past and Thoughts: “When a friend came to claim the body for burial, no one knew where it was; the soldier’s hospital trades in corpses: it sells them to the university, to the medical academy, it boils down skeletons, and so on. Finally, he found the body of poor Polezhaev in the cellar—it lay beneath others, and rats had gnawed off a foot.”

“Sashka” and other unprintable poems by Polezhaev became widely known, especially in military schools. This was an important subculture, since military service was central in the value system of the Russian elite: it was considered the only worthy occupation.

Drinking, debauchery, gambling, coarse and dangerous practical jokes, and hazing were typical military rituals. Dirty poems were an important component, and they were copied down in special underground notebooks. Lermontov had such a notebook with Polezhaev’s “Sashka” and other obscene works.

It is not surprising that Lermontov tried his hand at this genre. His so-called “Hussar” poems (“Peterhof Holiday” and “Ulan Woman,” among others) were popular at the military school where Lermontov was enrolled and later in the Guards, which were headed by Grand Duke Mikhail.

“Ulan Woman,” which graphically depicts group rape, was “the cadets favorite poem; probably even today the old notebook is secretly passed from hand to hand,” wrote a friend of Lermontov’s in 1856. Surely Grand Duke Mikhail knew the poem. The poet assumed that Mikhail gave it to his brother, Nicholas. But in this case, no punishment followed.

This was because, unlike Polezhaev’s works, Lermontov’s indecent poetry had no political underpinnings and as such became an accepted part of the Guards’ rituals. Lermontov’s obscenities were seen as mischief among one’s peers, while Polezhaev was an outsider: quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.

But naturally, Lermontov’s licentious poems (like similar works by Barkov and Pushkin) could never become part of the official culture. For the Romanovs, these “illegal” works by great poets (which could be read with a grin for relaxation—let’s not forget the tsar’s collection of erotica) made their creators somewhat unsavory.

Grand Duke Mikhail had Lermontov’s “Ulan Woman” in mind when he commented on Lermontov’s “The Demon”: “We had the Italian Beelzebub, the English Lucifer, the German Mephistopheles, and now there is the Russian Demon. That means there is more deviltry around. I just don’t understand who created whom: did Lermontov create the spirit of evil or did the spirit of evil create Lermontov?”²⁵

CHAPTER 8

Gogol, Ivanov, Tyutchev, and

the End of the Nicholas I Era

The literary sensation of the spring of 1835 was an essay by Vissarion Belinsky, a rising star of Russian criticism, which appeared in issues 7 and 8 of Telescope, a Moscow magazine. It was called “On the Russian Novella and the Novellas of Mr. Gogol,” and ecstatically praised two recently published collections by the twenty-six-year-old writer, which included his “Notes of a Madman,” “Nevsky Prospect,” and “Taras Bulba.”

Belinsky ended on an extremely high note: “What is Mr. Gogol in our literature? What is his place? … At the present time he is the head of literature, head of the poets; he is taking the place left by Pushkin.”

This provocative statement (later the critic would be dubbed “furious Vissarion”) hit two targets, pulling Pushkin from the literary throne and crowning young Gogol.

In his lifetime, Pushkin was buried more than once as a writer, but Belinsky was a particularly persistent gravedigger, writing that even in 1830 “the Pushkin period ended, since Pushkin himself ended, and with him his influence.” And this, even more painful (about the still-living Pushkin): “He died or maybe he’s just in a coma for a time.”

This was a hatchet job. What could Pushkin have felt reading these vicious attacks, while writing “The Bronze Horseman” and other poetic masterpieces?

Tellingly, Pushkin did not explode and merely rebuked Belinsky ironically in an anonymous note in his magazine, Contemporary: “If he combined his independence of thought and wit with more scholarship, more reading, more respect for tradition, more circumspection—in a word, more maturity, we would have a marvelous critic in him.”

The extremely ambitious Gogol was naturally very flattered by Belinsky’s praise. But it also put him in a corner: Gogol had positioned himself from the start as Pushkin’s most loyal student. He could not publicly agree with burying his idol alive.

(The prospect of literally being buried alive had always terrified Gogol. He began his famous “Testament” of 1845 with the following spooky directions: “I will that my body not be buried until clear signs of decomposition appear.” Like everything written by Gogol, this strange request can be interpreted not only literally but also symbolically. Gogol explained that he had “witnessed many sad occurrences resulting from our irrational haste in all matters” and expressed the hope that his posthumous voice would remind people of “circumspection,” the same word Pushkin used in chiding Belinsky in 1836.)

Russia’s Millennium, a monument designed by Mikhail Mikeshin and erected in 1862 in Novgorod, depicts the main figures of Russian history (a list approved by Emperor Alexander II), and the sculptor shows a sorrowful Gogol leaning on a radiant and angelic Pushkin.

Readers are generally aware that Ivan Turgenev, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy did not get along. But a legend persists about the incredible closeness of Pushkin and Gogol: after all, Pushkin hailed the young genius from Ukraine, laughing till he dropped at his satirical works and sighing over the elegiac ones, and he gave him the plot ideas for the comedy The Inspector-General and the epic Dead Souls. But were relations between Pushkin and Gogol truly so idyllic?

Gogol was the sole manufacturer of the legend, and it remains one of his greatest creations. Making his acquaintance in St. Petersburg in May 1831, Gogol sat down to write an article about Pushkin, proclaiming him the chief national poet and adding that “Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and perhaps the unique manifestation of the Russian spirit: this is Russian man in his evolution, the way he might appear two hundred years hence.”

This was shameless flattery, of course, but so inspired that it became very popular in Russia and is quoted to this day, when it should be clear that Gogol’s prediction was unlikely to ever come true.

There is no doubt that the thirty-two-year-old Pushkin came to like Gogol, ten years younger, an oddly dressed, short provincial with lanky blond hair, pointy nose, and sly gaze. He liked his works, full of attractive Ukrainian exotica, and his raconteur’s gift of telling funny stories. (Gogol could tell scabrous jokes just as easily; a friend marveled, “it was Ukrainian salo [lard] sprinkled with Aristophanes salt.”)¹

Pushkin immediately hired Gogol to work at his magazine; Contemporary needed “golden pens.” But this brought about their first serious conflict: Pushkin commissioned a manifesto from Gogol for the first issue, but its cocky tone offended many readers. Consequently, Pushkin had to disassociate himself from the article, deeply wounding Gogol’s vanity.

Presumably, it had been Pushkin’s little revenge on Gogol for stealing a plot Pushkin had intended to use himself—about a petty crook who arrives in a provincial town where he is taken for an important official from the capital traveling incognito. Laughing, Pushkin told his wife, “You have to be careful around this Ukrainian: he steals from you, and you can’t even complain.”²

Gogol wrote the comedy on Pushkin’s theme, The Inspector-General, in record time, and immediately started reading it in influential salons in the capital, hoping to get it onstage faster this way. Gogol was a master manipulator, having learned early in his youth the secrets of “reading minds, influencing hearts, and flattering with tenderness” and developing a virtuoso ability “to subordinate other people’s wills,” according to a memoirist.

Through Zhukovsky’s good offices, Gogol managed to interest Nicholas I in The Inspector-General—the tsar liked it “very much.”³ That was the green light for the play: it sailed past all the dangerous censorship reeds and was quickly accepted by the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater. From its completion (on December 4, 1835) to its premiere on the country’s main stage (on April 19, 1836) took only four and a half months, and a month after that the play was presented in Moscow, too.

At the very same time that The Inspector-General was being rehearsed onstage at the Alexandrinsky Theater with Gogol present, the composer Glinka was in the building lobby, working with the soloists and chorus on his new opera A Life for the Tsar, while the opera theater was being renovated.

The patriotic grand opera about the rise of the Romanov dynasty and a biting satire attacking the Russian bureaucracy were both supported by Nicholas I, who brought them to the stages of his theaters—evidence of how broadly the tsar interpreted the ideology of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” (Nicholas also liked two other great Russian comedies that scared his censors: Alexander Griboedov’s Woe from Wit and Alexander Ostrovsky’s Don’t Get into Someone Else’s Sleigh.)

At the premiere, Nicholas and his heir, the future Alexander II, sat in the royal box, laughing wholeheartedly and applauding demonstratively, prompting the applause of the aristocrats who had filled the hall, knowing that the tsar would attend.

Some ministers hissed angrily, “Why did we bother to come for this stupid farce? As if there is a city like this in Russia! Couldn’t Gogol portray one decent, honest man?” But because the monarch liked the play, they could not express themselves openly. Still, it was a mystery to many courtiers why Nicholas had approved a play that mocked the authorities so blatantly.

When the performance was over, the actors heard the emperor’s loud voice as he came onstage from his box: “Everyone got what he deserved in this play, and I more than the others!”⁴ The leading actors were given a raise and valuable presents. Gogol, who had been paid 2,500 rubles for the play, also received a gift from the tsar.

This was the first of the financial handouts from the imperial treasury that Gogol would request and receive until the end of his life. Pushkin asked for money with great reluctance, considering it extremely humiliating. Gogol, much more practical, was a great fund-raiser and usually got what he wanted (mostly with the help of Zhukovsky).

Pushkin did not show up at the premiere of The Inspector-General: was he demonstrating his unhappiness over the stolen plot? The fact is that Pushkin suddenly became alienated from Gogol, and at the very moment when the young writer was hysterical. After the premiere, Gogol fell into a panicked state: “Everyone is against me. Esteemed officials scream that nothing is sacred to me. The police are against me, the merchants are against me, the writers are against me. If not for the high protection of the Sovereign, my play would never have been staged. Now I see what it means to be a comedy writer. The slightest hint of truth—and everyone rises up against you, not just one person, but entire strata.”

So Gogol took Pushkin’s coolness—perhaps overreacting—as betrayal. Six weeks after the premiere, in June 1836, Gogol fled Russia for Europe, whining to a friend, “A contemporary writer, a comedy writer, an observer of morals must be far away. No man is a prophet in his own land.” From Hamburg, Gogol complained in a letter to Zhukovsky, “I did not have time and could not say good-bye even to Pushkin; of course, that is his fault.” On that bitter note, Gogol’s personal relationship with Pushkin ended.

In Europe, Gogol learned of Pushkin’s death. From that moment, Gogol seemed to forget how Pushkin had injured his feelings. He began integrating Pushkin into his own mythos, sending letters from Rome to various Russian friends, all with much the same message: “My loss is greater than anyone else’s … My life, my highest pleasure died with him … I never undertook anything, I never wrote anything without his advice. Anything that is good in me I owe to him.”

Although settling in Rome, Gogol did not become a dissident. On the contrary, he quickly distanced himself from the satiric extremes of his play and embraced the Nicholas I–Uvarov ideological triad, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” In fact, he was the first great Russian writer to accept this doctrine fully and unconditionally. (The second was Dostoevsky.)

Gogol’s evolution was apparently sincere. While the path had been cleared somewhat for him by the late Pushkin, Gogol went much further.

This is Gogol on Orthodoxy: “Reason does not give man full ability to strive forward. There is a higher ability; its name is wisdom, and only Christ can give it to us.” Gogol explains that the poet “better than others hears God’s hand in everything that happens in Russia, and feels the proximity of another Kingdom. That is why our poets’ sound turns biblical.”

On autocracy, Gogol cites what he allegedly heard from Pushkin: “The state without a plenipotentiary monarch is an automaton: at best it could achieve what the United States has achieved. And what is the United States? Carrion; a man there is so worn down that he’s not worth a shelled egg. A state without a plenipotentiary monarch is like an orchestra without a Kapellmeister.”

Gogol hailed the patriotic peasant Ivan Susanin, the hero of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar: “No royal house began as unusually as the house of Romanov. Its beginning was already an exploit of love. The last and lowliest subject in the state laid his life down in order to give us the Tsar, and with this pure sacrifice he tied inseparably the Tsar with his subjects. Love entered our blood, and it bound all of us to the Tsar.”

The trickiest part for Gogol was to preach about nationality and the Russian national idea, precisely because he was living in the West. Gogol found wiggle room in an explanation (with Solzhenitsyn-like overtones): “I knew that I was not traveling in order to enjoy foreign places but rather to suffer—as if I had a premonition that I would learn Russia’s value only outside Russia and would add to my love for her from afar.”

For Russian liberals and Westernizers, all this sounded like hypocritical drivel. They reacted with fury to Gogol’s book Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, published in early 1847 in St. Petersburg, and the source of almost all the citations above. The harshest criticism came from the influential progressive critic Belinsky.

Dying of consumption, the thirty-six-year-old Belinsky was being treated in Europe. He wrote Gogol a long scathing letter, which turned into his profession de foi. The dissident Herzen printed the text for the first time in 1855 in his antigovernment almanac, Polar Star, which he published in London. In Russia, the letter was considered revolutionary propaganda and banned.

Pavel Annenkov, who was a friend of both Gogol and Belinsky, recalled how the critic, emaciated and resembling an old man with his deathly pale face, said in his muffled voice as he sat down to write his letter (which, in Annenkov’s words, “sounded throughout intellectual Russia like a trumpet call”), “What can I do? We must use every method to save people from a madman, even if it’s Homer himself who went mad.”⁵

Imagine Gogol’s reaction to his former apologist addressing him this way: “Preacher of the knout, apostle of ignorance, proponent of obscurantism, panegyrist of Tatar mores—what are you doing! Look down at your feet—you are standing at the abyss … That you align yourself with the Orthodox Church, I can understand: it always supported the knout and despotism; but why did you drag in Christ here?”

In publishing his Correspondence with Friends, Gogol wanted to “endow dissolute Russian life at last with a code of great rules and unshakable axioms that would help organize its inner world as a model for all other nations,” said Annenkov. The book consisted of his real letters (naturally, expanded and edited) and essays especially written for the book.

Gogol turned out to be a powerful preacher. The letters have the best qualities of Gogol’s prose, making it so difficult to translate: they are vivid, musical, with their own rhythm and imbued with passion for Russia, whose salvation Gogol saw in Christian self-betterment.

Belinsky, for whom purely literary qualities were always less important than ideology, disagreed with Gogol. “Russia sees its salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, humanism. It does not need preaching (it has heard plenty), or prayers (it has repeated enough of them), but the awakening in the people of human dignity, lost for so many centuries in mud and manure.”

The dying but still fiery Belinsky tore apart the ideological triad of Nicholas-Uvarov-Gogol, in passim taking a swipe angrily (and unfairly) at Pushkin; he declared to Gogol that in Russia “the popularity drops quickly of great talents that give themselves sincerely or insincerely to the service of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.’ A striking example is Pushkin, who needed only to write two or three sucking-up poems and don the court uniform to lose the people’s love!”

Of course, Pushkin had never lost the people’s love, whatever that may be; his reputation suffered only in a small albeit influential circle of progressive intelligentsia, whose spokesman was Belinsky.

For that radical group, Gogol’s evolution, which began with the colorful, quasifolkloric “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka,” then moved through his mystical and tragic “St. Petersburg Stories” (“Nevsky Prospect,” “Notes of a Madman,” “The Nose,” “The Overcoat”) to the powerful, bitter satire of The Inspector-General and volume 1 of Dead Souls, came crashing down in the Christian sermonizing of Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends.

Progressives, like their leader Belinsky, saw Gogol’s ideological shift as either a bizarre psychological digression or the desire to suck up to Nicholas, whose financial aid to the writer was widely known (Gogol proudly told his friends about it). But in fact, Gogol’s transformation was organic, if ultimately tragic.

Gogol always felt what he called “a passion for painting.” He took drawing classes at the Academy of Arts and loved making “architectural landscapes”: churches, temples, ruins. He wrote two important pieces about contemporary Russian artists: the essay “The Last Day of Pompeii,” written in 1834 in response to the notorious painting by Briullov on exhibition in St. Petersburg, and “Historical Painter Ivanov,” written in 1846 about Gogol’s friend Alexander Ivanov and his enormous canvas Christ Appearing to the People, created in 1837–1858 and now regarded as one of the greatest nineteenth-century Russian paintings.

The Romantic Briullov attracted the twenty-five-year-old art lover Gogol as an exotic figure and as a master celebrated in Europe, whose style—striking composition, vivid contrasts, bold chiaroscuro, and hot colors—were close to Gogol’s early writings.

In his essay, Gogol compared The Last Day of Pompeii to opera. But even then Gogol was expressing some doubts on the value of “operatic effects” in art: “In the hands of a real talent they are true and can turn man into a giant; but used by a pretender, they are disgusting to connoisseurs.”

Reaching for a higher spiritual plane, while rejecting everything “false,” brought Gogol to a friendship in 1838 with Ivanov, thirty-two and living, like Gogol, in Rome.

Like his new friend, Ivanov was strange and rather mysterious (“helpless and weak, one of those who think with their heart,”⁶ as the poet Rainer-Maria Rilke later described him). He was the complete opposite of the flashy, confident epicurean Briullov.

In his St. Petersburg period, Gogol envied Briullov’s unprecedented access to the emperor and high society, so tempting—and unattainable—to the provincial Gogol. Briullov liked Gogol, but regarded him a bit down his nose. The innocent and naive Ivanov was another matter completely; when Gogol arrived in Rome, already a maître, he became the painter’s guru and patron.

In Rome both Gogol and Ivanov were toiling on their magnum opuses: the writer was wrestling with Dead Souls, the artist with Christ Appearing to the People. Both came to regard their work as a spiritual exploit, a religious service to the Russian national idea. Both unmarried (and not attracted by women), Gogol and Ivanov labored far from Russia, in the colorful world of Rome that had enchanted them and was such a contrast to their previous life in the severe Russian capital. In Rome, Gogol and Ivanov were the central figures in the small colony of Russian artists studying in Italy on stipends from the Imperial Academy of Arts.

Short Ivanov in those years was “rather portly, with a little beard, sad brown eyes and a typical Slavic face.”⁷ Gogol still enjoyed eating well and drinking in good company, preferring pasta with grated cheese and red wine. He liked crostata with cherries. He learned to add rum to warmed goat’s milk, calling the drink “gogol-mogol.” (He liked to joke, “Gogol loves gogol-mogol.”)

But gradually his mood and health deteriorated: he complained of migraines, pains in his stomach, nervous fits, and faints, growing gloomy and cranky. He became unbearable at his favorite taverna, sending a dish back two or three times in a row, until the waiters refused to serve him: “Signor Niccolò, there is no pleasing you, and the owner charges us for the dishes you send back.”

Strangely, Ivanov’s health declined in parallel with Gogol’s: he too lost weight, turned pale, and became paranoid. Turgenev suggested that in Rome Ivanov “went a bit crazy: the twenty-five years of solitude took their toll.” In a confidential letter to his friend Annenkov, the writer described how Ivanov began to assure him, “turning white and laughing nervously that he was being poisoned with a special potion, therefore he often did not eat.”⁸ Ivanov was afraid to drink water in taverns and preferred to fill bottles from fountains.

In his essay on Ivanov, Gogol praised him as the Russian Raphael. He described him as a man who “was dead to everything in the world except his work.” That was now the model of a truly artistic life for Gogol, not the glamorous existence of his former idol, Briullov.

In the end, Gogol did not finish writing Dead Souls and Ivanov did not complete Christ Appearing to the People. Even unfinished, these monumental works occupy a central place in the panorama of Russian nineteenth-century culture.

A painterly approach colors Dead Souls, and Ivanov’s canvas is dominated by a religious idea. Rilke, with his subtle feeling for Russian culture, described this idea as “profound Russian piety that demanded its embodiment in painting.”

Both Gogol and Ivanov became outsiders for the Russian establishment, and yet Tsar Nicholas I supported both. In 1845, in Rome on state business, the tsar visited Ivanov’s studio; he had been warned that the painter was a “crazy mystic,” but he found his magnum opus “wonderful” (the heir, Alexander, liked it very much too).⁹ Aid from the imperial treasury eased Ivanov’s lot in Rome.

Now the final act of Gogol’s tragedy was starting. Gogol had worked on Dead Souls since 1835. The writer always said that the plot (like that of The Inspector-General) had been “a gift” from Pushkin. By making Pushkin the godfather of Dead Souls, Gogol positioned his novel as the poet’s “sacred will” and thus raised its status.

The plot is extremely simple: the crook Chichikov travels around the Russian provinces, visiting local landowners to buy up their serfs—not living serfs, but dead ones. These serfs, referred to in legal documents as “souls,” had not yet been removed from the tax rolls and therefore could be used fraudulently as collateral for loans from the state treasury, which Chichikov planned to do.

Nothing much happens in the book: Chichikov travels from one place to another, encountering various bizarre landowners. But Gogol turns those owners of “dead souls” into unforgettable characters whose names have become symbols in Russia. (As, of course, did the book’s title.)

Gogol’s concept of the book kept changing, and eventually he came to see it as something like Dante’s Divine Comedy or even Homer’s Odyssey. (He was often compared with Homer later by his fervent admirers in Russia.) Gogol decided that his work was not a mere novel, but a “poem.” This again connected him with Pushkin: “This work of mine is his creation. He made me swear to write it.”

In 1842, with the help of court circles, Gogol managed to get around the censors and published the first volume of Dead Souls in Russia. “Writers, journalists, book sellers, lay people—all say that there hasn’t been so much hullabaloo in the literary world in a long time, with some reviling your work and others praising it,”¹⁰ a friend wrote to Gogol from Moscow.

Dostoevsky later confirmed this: “This was the way young people were then; two or three would get together: ‘Why don’t we read Gogol, gentlemen!’ and they would sit and read aloud to one another, perhaps the whole night through.” But such literary acclaim was no longer enough for Gogol. He perceived himself as a prophet exiled from his homeland, whose writing could miraculously transform all of life in Russia: “Like a silent monk, he lives in the world without belonging to it, his pure, unsullied soul conversing only with God.”

When this ideal author (in fact, Gogol’s self-portrait) appeals to Russia, “The sermon will pierce the soul and will not fall on barren soil. Like an angel’s grief, our poetry will flare up and strike all the strings that there may be in the Russian person, bringing holiness into the most coarsened (read: ‘dead’) souls.”

In the summer of 1851, Gogol informed friends that he had finished the second volume of Dead Souls and began reading chapters to them. He planned a trilogy, something like the “Inferno,” “Purgatory,” and “Paradise” of The Divine Comedy. The friends were impressed, but Gogol, hurt by the failure of Correspondence with Friends, was dubious.

He had always suffered bouts of profound melancholy. The condition was exacerbated by his return to Russia in 1848, where everything—climate, landscape, food, authorities—depressed him: “You feel that Russia is not a brotherly warm place, but a cold blizzardy post station, where the station master, totally indifferent to everything, has only one curt reply, ‘No horses!’ ”

Gogol stayed at the house of his Moscow friend Count Alexander Tolstoy. He stopped writing, read only religious books, went to church assiduously, spent his nights in prayer, and imposed a debilitating fast upon himself: he ate once a day, and then just a few spoons of oatmeal soup made with water or cabbage broth. He refused any other food, explaining that it made his “intestines twist.”

On Sunday, February 10, 1852, Gogol asked Count Tolstoy to keep the manuscript of the second volume, explaining, “I have moments when I want to burn all of it. But I would regret it. I think there is something good in there.”¹¹ The count refused: he did not want to feed Gogol’s depression.

Two days later, on Tuesday morning, the count entered Gogol’s room and found him weeping by the stove, where the last manuscript pages were burning: “Look what I did! I wanted to destroy a few things, which I set aside, but I burned everything! How powerful the devil is—look what he made me do!… Now it’s all lost.”

Tolstoy, realizing in horror that Gogol had burned the second volume of Dead Souls, tried to calm him down: “But you can remember it, can’t you?” Gogol stopped weeping. “Yes, I can, I can; it’s all in my head.” (He used to read entire chapters from the manuscript to his friends by heart, like poetry.)

But Gogol had no strength or desire to work or even to live. He never left his room again, lying on the couch with eyes shut and worry beads in his hands, no longer eating or interacting with people.

A week passed this way. The count called in the best doctors in Moscow. A concilium gathered: six doctors examined and palpated the suffering patient (his stomach was so soft and empty that they could feel the vertebrae of his spine through it) and decided that he needed to be bled. They attached six large leeches to his nose, overcoming his resistance.

Gogol groaned and screamed, “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!” But they held his hands so that he would not tear off the leeches. They put a mustard plaster on his feet and ice on his head, and poured medicine into his mouth. After a few days of this torture, Gogol breathed his last, with the words “How sweet to die.”

. . .

Gogol’s death at age forty-two stunned the Russian intellectual elite. Turgenev, then thirty-three, proclaimed in the obituary published by the Moscow Gazette, “Yes, he died, that man whom we now have the bitter right given by death to call great; a man whose name marked an era in the history of our literature.”

It was soon discovered that Gogol had kept rough drafts of five chapters from the second volume of Dead Souls, which were published three and a half years later (to mixed reviews). In the meantime, the authorities reacted with bewilderment: how should they respond to Gogol’s demise? Fifteen years earlier, Nicholas I made sure that Pushkin’s end was presented as the death of a Christian. Why did he not want to use the death of the greatest advocate of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” for the same propaganda purposes? Many felt that Gogol died “a Christian, saint, and monk.” (A posthumous inventory of his estate showed that all his possessions were worth a miserable 43 rubles, 88 kopecks.)

Paradoxically, Gogol’s evolution to fanatical Christianity and boundless loyalty to the tsar was too extreme and off-putting to the authorities in Russia. While demanding fealty to the state, they never trusted real fanatics and feared them. The administration needed dutiful servants, not idealistic knights on white chargers.

The authorities banned all obituaries for Gogol, and the tsar had Turgenev arrested for a month and then sent into exile to his country estate in Orlov Province for publishing one. (During his confinement, Turgenev wrote his powerful antiserfdom story “Mumu,” the drama of a deaf-mute servant of a cruel owner, who forced him to drown his beloved dog.)

This fear of uncontrollable, “freelance” ideological activity explained why Nicholas and his ministers so disliked the Slavophiles, an influential group of Moscow intellectuals who propagated a romantic theory that Russia should not emulate the West, but instead pursue its unique and independent cultural and political path.

The Slavophiles also believed in “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” but for them it was not a bureaucratic formula but a broad philosophical foundation for a national culture. They therefore criticized what they saw as ossified aspects of the contemporary Russian state. Calling for a free, nationally oriented Russian culture, the Slavophiles challenged the official line, but also the ideas of such radical antimonarchist Westernizers as Belinsky and Herzen.

The great Slavophile poet Alexei Khomyakov proclaimed that Gogol, Ivanov, and Glinka were the Holy Trinity of truly Slavophile artists. But the supreme power was just as uncomfortable with Alexander Ivanov as it was with Gogol. When the artist returned to St. Petersburg in 1858, after thirty years in Italy, the authorities did not know what to do with this mad mystic who babbled about the messianic destiny of the “Slavic tribe.”

Ivanov did not want to accept official commissions, which made him clearly unfit for service. Feeling injured and snubbed, he died two months after returning to his homeland, just two weeks short of his fifty-second birthday.

In the summer of 1844, Nicholas read an anonymous brochure in French, just published in Munich. It expressed bold ideas about Russia’s modern geopolitical role in Europe. The author wrote that as a result of Russia’s victory over Napoleon, Western Europe (“The Europe of Charles the Great”) was at last face-to-face with Eastern Europe (“The Europe of Peter the Great”). This Eastern Europe, with Russia as its heart and soul, was the legitimate heir of Byzantium and must make one more decisive breakthrough, vanquishing Turkey and establishing hegemony in the Middle East.

Nicholas I told Count Benckendorff, chief of the gendarmes and his closest adviser, that he “found all my thoughts”¹² in that brochure and commanded him to find out the author. The omniscient Benckendorff already had: it was written and printed by someone he knew well, Fedor Tyutchev, forty years old, a former Russian diplomat in Munich and Turin, an amateur poet who had been living abroad for twenty-two years.

Tyutchev, Yevgeny Baratynsky, and Afanasy Fet are the three great Russian poets of the nineteenth century, unheralded in the West but revered by educated Russians. Leo Tolstoy rated Tyutchev higher than Pushkin. (Joseph Brodsky sometimes held Baratynsky at that level, while being more skeptical about Tyutchev’s standing.)

When Tolstoy read Tyutchev’s poetry aloud to his guests, he invariably wept: in his sophisticated proto-Symbolist philosophical miniatures, Tyutchev captured the most subtle emotional nuances, not unlike Tolstoy’s prose. Tyutchev began writing poetry at the age of ten, and when he was thirty-three, in 1836, Pushkin printed twenty-four of his poems in Contemporary.

Tyutchev called his poems “scribbles,” writing them hurriedly on scraps of paper that his wife then gathered up. His output was not large—around four hundred little poems over sixty-nine years of life, including pièces d’occasion, epigrams, and such.

He published his first book of verse when he was in his fifties, yielding to the urging of his friend Turgenev, who edited the publication. Tyutchev considered his true calling to be politics and political writing, and that is how Nicholas I noticed him.

Nicholas appreciated political poetry when it suited his propaganda goals. When he suppressed the 1831 Polish rebellion against Russian occupiers and Pushkin and Zhukovsky celebrated the victory with ultrapatriotic poems, the emperor issued the poems instantly in a special edition published by the military printing press.

At the time, the West supported the Poles. Western parliamentarians and journalists were especially vociferous. Pushkin’s poems, defending Russia’s position, was addressed to them. He intended to publish his anti-Western poems in the Paris press, but failed: Pushkin did not have the necessary contacts.

Tyutchev, on the other hand, was a professional diplomat with a vast network of influential European intellectuals (he was friends with the philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the poet Heinrich Heine) and a good understanding of their psychology. Nicholas decided it would be a terrible waste not to use such a person for pro-Russian propaganda in the West, especially since that was Tyutchev’s ardent wish.

. . .

On the emperor’s orders, Tyutchev was quickly reinstated to service in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He made a strange official. Of medium height, frail, with a pale, clean-shaven face and unruly, prematurely gray hair, carelessly dressed, seemingly clumsy and distracted, Tyutchev spent all his time in St. Petersburg’s high-society salons.

He spoke French better than Russian and, eagerly turning the conversation to foreign policy, would instantly become the center of attention at every gathering, so witty and to the point were his opinions.

Seemingly casual improvisations, his political aphorisms and bon mots spread throughout the capital and regularly appeared in dispatches of foreign ambassadors in St. Petersburg. Tyutchev’s commentaries were all the more effective because they so little resembled the dull official statements of the authorities. One perceptive observer noted that these “spontaneous” chats in society were Tyutchev’s “real job.”¹³

Tyutchev effectively executed delicate special assignments for the tsar. Nicholas was terribly upset by the French revolution of 1848. The emperor was prepared to play his assumed role of gendarme of Europe and defender of European monarchy. Tyutchev wrote a large article in French, “La Russie et la révolution,” stating that the only obstacle to a European revolutionary explosion was the Russian “Christian Empire.”

Nicholas read it in manuscript and had it printed in Paris as “Mémoire présenté à l’empereur Nicolas depuis la révolution de février, par un russe, employé supérieur aux affaires étrangères,” in an extremely limited edition of twelve copies. Tyutchev’s brochure was sent by special channels to the political leaders of France, including Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the republic. The French correctly regarded this as a “quasi-official document,” and it was widely quoted in the European press.

The international situation was unfavorable for Russia then. France, with Napoleon’s defeat in the War of 1812 a distant memory, wanted to limit Russia’s role as arbiter in European affairs; so did England. Both countries were worried by Russia’s pressure on Turkey, which Nicholas I called “the sick man of Europe.” England feared that if Russia affirmed itself in the Balkans, home to millions of Orthodox Slavs, it would be a major threat. Anti-Russian rhetoric ran high in the European press.

On the Russian side, the Slavophiles tried to fire up Nicholas’s hidden pan-Slavic ambitions, which Tyutchev supported. In 1849 he wrote “The Dawn”:

Arise, Rus! The hour is nigh!

Arise for the sake of Christ’s service!

Isn’t it time to make the sign of the cross

And toll the bell of Tsargrad?

Tyutchev and his fellow thinkers did not limit their goals to the taking of Tsargrad (as Russians called Constantinople). This is how he defined the borders of the “Russian Kingdom” in another poem of that year, “Russian Geography”: “From the Nile to the Neva, from Elba to China, from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube.”

Such voracious geographical appetites struck even Nicholas as excessive, so this poem remained in manuscript. Later, when the emperor read Tyutchev’s poem “Prophecy” in Contemporary, in which the poet predicted that Nicholas would triumphantly enter St. Sophia in Constantinople as “All-Slavic Tsar,” the monarch crossed out the lines and wrote, “Such phrases must not be allowed.”¹⁴ Nicholas’s decision was handed down to the minister of foreign affairs.

But despite Tyutchev’s political extremes, Nicholas valued him highly as an agent of influence. In 1853, on the eve of armed conflict with Turkey, Tyutchev was sent to Paris on a special assignment to work on French journalists, who were almost all in favor of Turkey in the conflict with Russia. The French ambassador in St. Petersburg warned his government about this, advising that Tyutchev “must be kept under observation,” which the French police did.

The British ambassador also informed his department about Tyutchev’s assignment in Europe, adding, “One gets the impression that at the present moment the Russian government is making great efforts to influence the public press in foreign nations and, as is known, has spent significant sums on this.”¹⁵

Equipped with royal subsidies, Tyutchev did what he could in Paris. It was too little, too late: no propaganda moves on the part of the Russian government could prevent England and France from siding with Turkey in the coming war.

In September 1854, the sixty-thousand-strong Anglo-French expeditionary corps landed in the Crimea and with the Turks besieged Sevastopol, an important naval base on the Black Sea. From the start, the war did not go the way Nicholas wanted. He had overestimated Russian military might. Nicholas was certain that in his thirty years on the throne, he had turned Russia into an undefeatable colossus. Suddenly, he discovered that the colossus had feet of clay.

Nicholas had almost a million armed men. But the Russian soldiers used obsolete rifles and artillery, the provisioning was terrible (there wasn’t a single railroad connecting continental Russia with Sevastopol), and the Russian sailing fleet could not compete with European steamships.

The war turned into a competition of technology and, more broadly, of economies; serf-holding, backward Russia could not beat the advanced West. The bravery of the Russian soldiers was of little help.

The bad news from Sevastopol plunged the proud and severe Nicholas into a deep depression. That magnificent giant, fifty-eight years old, with a rich commanding voice that sometimes made even experienced officers faint, now wept like a child when he received dispatches about defeats in the Crimea, and at night he prayed fervently, bowing low before the icons in the Winter Palace chapel.¹⁶ The once ironclad health of the emperor collapsed along with his faith in Russia’s military power.

Nicholas I burned up in a few days, dying February 18, 1855; the official cause of death was pneumonia. It came so unexpectedly that there was talk in St. Petersburg that he had committed suicide by poison.

That conspiratorial theory, so typical for Russian history, with its secrets and mysterious deaths of national leaders, is still kept alive by several suspicious circumstances: the suddenness of Nicholas’s death, its coincidence with bad news from the Crimean front, and the contradictions in the official reports on the emperor’s final illness.

Dying in the Winter Palace, where he lay on a simple iron bed under a soldier’s overcoat rather than a blanket, Nicholas I spoke haltingly with a rasp to his heir, Grand Duke Alexander: “I hand over command, unfortunately not in the good order I would have liked, leaving you many worries and concerns.”

Those bitter words concerned the military and diplomatic situation, the only one that worried Nicholas. The failure in the war in the Crimea revealed the great vulnerability of his empire.

Nicholas had no idea that he was leaving yet another legacy to his son—a group of young men, his subjects, who would constitute the glory and pride of nineteenth-century Russian culture. They were Ivan Turgenev, thirty-six, Afanasy Fet, thirty-four, Fedor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Nekrasov, both thirty-three, Alexander Ostrovsky, thirty-one, and Leo Tolstoy, twenty-six.

All these young lions formed in Nicholas’s reign, when, according to yet another great contemporary of Nicholas I, the dissident Alexander Herzen, “educated Russia, with a ball and chain, eked out a pathetic existence in profound, humiliating, insulting silence.”

This polemical evaluation of cultural life under Nicholas as an intellectual desert was taken up by Soviet propaganda and survived for three-quarters of a century, turning into dogma. The real situation was not quite so black-and-white.

Let us recall such cultural titans as Pushkin, Gogol, and the composer Glinka, who all interacted with Nicholas. It is true that Catherine II was in close contact with the poet Derzhavin, and Alexander I with Karamzin and Zhukovsky. But in those days the Russian cultural elite was a compact group and its members naturally were part of the court circle as well.

The situation under Nicholas I was different: Glinka and Gogol had no entrée into royal circles. Their promonarchist views were not the result of special status in the court, but rather were formed at least in part thanks to the emperor’s skillful attitude and personal attention.

It should be no surprise that his contemporaries often had diametrically opposed views of Nicholas, influenced by their political convictions. In the opinion of conservative writer and critic Konstantin Leontiev, Nicholas I was the “ideal autocrat the likes of which history has not produced in a long time.”¹⁷

The radical liberal Herzen, on the contrary, saw in Nicholas misfortune for Russia and considered him one of the “military leaders who have lost everything civilian, everything human, and have only one passion left—to rule; narrow mind, no heart at all.”

Nicholas I’s historical standing was hopelessly damaged by the humiliating failure in the Crimean War. Even the monarchist and nationalist Tyutchev was disillusioned in his former idol.

Since Nicholas’s own main criterion for a nation’s grandeur was its military might, the severity of this judgment was warranted. The army created by Nicholas, his beloved child, did not stand the test. However, the ideological triad “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” developed under his aegis, proved to be much stronger. While sometimes vanishing from the cultural horizon, it has survived in its basic form to this day. It was used, with modifications to suit changing political realities, under Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II, and later even by Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, and Vladimir Putin. For the Soviet leaders, orthodoxy was the Communist ideology, autocracy—the rule of the Party—and nationality remained. Under Putin, the triad morphed again: Russian Orthodoxy was returned, autocracy became paternalistic rule, and nationality persisted as nationalism.

PART IV

CHAPTER 9

Alexander II, Tolstoy,

Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

Alexander II, the son of Nicholas I, who took the throne on February 19, 1855, had been prepared for the role of monarch—thanks to the poet Zhukovsky—as none of his predecessors or descendants were or would be.

Zhukovsky oversaw the heir’s education for twelve years, from 1826 until 1838. All the classes throughout the period were guided by his detailed plan, approved by Nicholas. Zhukovsky concentrated on Russian literature and Russian history, and other experienced instructors taught the many other subjects.

Zhukovsky, with the tsar’s support, declared an active, energetic monarch the goal of his training, and developed a rather tight schedule for Alexander: reveille at six a.m., lights out at ten p.m. After prayers and breakfast, there were five hours of classes (with an hour break), two hours for lunch (with a walk and rest before and after), more classes from five to seven, then gymnastics and dinner. Before bed, there was time for reflection and diary writing, which Zhukovsky considered mandatory.

Nicholas believed that as a Romanov, the heir “must be military to the bone, otherwise he will be lost in our age.”¹ Zhukovsky disagreed: “The passion for military craft will cramp his soul: he will become accustomed to see the people as his regiment and his Homeland as a barracks.”²

Following Zhukovsky’s curriculum, Alexander read The Iliad, Don Quixote, and Gulliver’s Travels and, in Russian literature, works by Karamzin and Pushkin; once, Pushkin read aloud his ultrapatriotic poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” in the heir’s presence. Zhukovsky and the fabulist Krylov read and explained their own writings to him.

The young heir learned to shoot and fence, and he rode well and danced gracefully. Like his father, he liked to draw (especially sketches of new military uniforms) and loved opera (especially Rossini and Glinka, for his A Life for the Tsar). Alexander and his two classmates published a children’s magazine called “The Ant Hill,” which was supervised by Nicholas I personally.

Alexander was brought up to be rather broad-minded with a European worldview (he knew English, French, German, and Polish), and he grew up to be much milder and more compassionate than his severe father. Zhukovsky enjoyed a good cry (a tribute to Romantic ideals) and taught his pupil not to be ashamed of tears. The poet wanted to form a clement sovereign. Zhukovsky had released his serfs, a rare gesture that even Pushkin had not attempted. He taught Alexander that serfdom was evil.

Tellingly, Nicholas did not oppose this. He had long contemplated emancipation of the serfs but never took the step: he was afraid it would shatter the empire. Nicholas refused to pardon the Decembrists he had exiled to Siberia, despite the requests from Zhukovsky and others. But he listened to his son. When Alexander and Zhukovsky and their retinue traveled through Russia in 1837 (part of the heir’s education), Alexander met the Decembrists in distant Siberia and was horrified by their ordeal. He asked his father to at least ameliorate their living conditions, which was done. (Later, when he became tsar, his first act was to pardon the Decembrists.)

Zhukovsky considered bringing up Alexander to the Russian throne as the most important work of his life—his best poem. In 1841 he retired from his post as tutor and moved to Germany, having married a Romantic maiden almost a third his age. After bearing two children, his wife fell into a deep depression (it was hereditary), spending weeks at a time in bed. Zhukovsky lived in despair: “My poor wife is like a skeleton, and I can’t alleviate her suffering: there is nothing to relieve her of her black thoughts!”

Zhukovsky went blind, but continued to record his poems with a machine he invented. He died in Baden-Baden at the age of sixty-nine. His body was shipped to St. Petersburg, where he was buried at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, next to the grave of Karamzin. The proximity was symbolic. If not for Pushkin, Zhukovsky and Karamzin would be considered the fathers of the new Russian literature: Karamzin of prose, and Zhukovsky of poetry. The rare combination of talent, grace, and kindness that these two men embodied was probably not seen again in Russian culture until Anton Chekhov.

On February 6, 1856, the writer Dmitry Grigorovich went to a dinner given by Contemporary (arguably the best Russian magazine of the time). The monthly dinners celebrating the latest issue were a tradition started by the editor, the great poet Nikolai Nekrasov, at the helm from 1847.

Grigorovich was bringing another of the magazine’s authors with him—the clumsy, ugly, and passive-aggressive Count Leo Tolstoy. The twenty-seven-year-old count had already published several prose pieces in Contemporary, including the novellas Childhood and Adolescence and sketches from his experiences in the Crimean War, but he still did not feel like an insider.

On the way, the gentlemanly Grigorovich gave the grumpy Tolstoy advice on how to behave at the dinner—not in the sense of social etiquette (the magazine’s crowd did not care about that) but in terms of political correctness. Grigorovich worried that the young count, the only of the magazine’s authors to sport a military uniform, had an embarrassing inclination to shoot from the hip, making provocative pronouncements—for example, that Shakespeare was nothing more than an empty phrasemonger.

Grigorovich particularly asked Tolstoy not to berate George Sand, for he had often heard the count attack the celebrated French novelist and feminist. They “fanatically adored” her at Contemporary, Nekrasov and his closest associate, the radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and the magazine’s constant contributor, liberal writer Ivan Turgenev.

Later Grigorovich recalled, “At first, the dinner went well; Tolstoy was rather taciturn, but toward the end he gave in. Hearing praise for Sand’s latest novel, he abruptly declared that he hated her, adding that the heroines of her novels, if they existed in real life, should be put in stocks and driven around the streets of St. Petersburg as a lesson.”³

Nekrasov was offended and wrote to a friend about Tolstoy’s outburst: “What nonsense he babbled at my dinner yesterday! The devil knows what’s in his head! He says such stupid and even nasty things. It would be a shame if these traits of landowning and military influence do not change in him. An excellent talent will be lost!”⁴

Turgenev was also outraged: “I almost quarreled with Tolstoy—really, it’s impossible for ignorance not to show in one way or another. The other day, at Nekrasov’s dinner, he said so many trite and crude things about G. Sand that I can’t even convey it all.”⁵

In our day, very few people read the novels of George Sand (she wrote almost sixty) with the same interest as progressive intellectuals all over Europe did at the time; people look at her books today primarily because they have heard about her notorious affairs with Chopin, Alfred de Musset, and Prosper Mérimée. But in the mid-nineteenth century, Sand’s works were perceived as more than romans à clef or entertaining super-romantic narratives; they were textbooks of life.

Dostoevsky recalled that he considered Sand then as the head of a movement for a radical social renewal of humanity. The adoration of Sand in Russia was particularly fervent, and Dostoevsky explained why: “Only this was permitted, that is, novels, the rest, practically every thought, especially from France, was strictly banned.” (According to Dostoevsky, the Russian censors made a huge error in allowing the works of George Sand.)

Turgenev was a “georgesandista,” and the most ardent Westernizer among them. He had read Shakespeare, Byron, and Schiller in their original languages as a child. Later, in St. Petersburg, he argued with Nekrasov and his other friends from Contemporary that even Pushkin and Lermontov, “if you look closely,” were only imitating European geniuses like Shakespeare and Byron.⁶

Early on as a writer, Turgenev focused on the West, measuring himself against Western literary criteria, and declaring, according to friends, “No, I’m a European at heart, my demands of life are also European! … At the very first chance, I’ll flee without looking back, and you won’t see hide or hair of me!”⁷

In order to realize his European ambitions, which were rather unusual even for his elite cosmopolitan circle, he needed a starting point in the West. The fulfillment of Turgenev’s dream, strangely enough, came via George Sand.

In early 1842 the Paris glitterati were excited: the new left-radical magazine La Revue indépendante started serializing George Sand’s sensational novel Consuelo, a story about the adventures of a fictional great singer in eighteenth-century Venice. The novel’s immediate success was due in part to it being a roman à clef: the readers easily recognized the heroine as contralto Pauline Garcia-Viardot, a close friend of the author.

Viardot’s life did resemble a novel, or a fairy tale. Born to a family of singers from Spain (her older sister was the famous mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran), she debuted in Paris in 1838 at the age of seventeen, stunning the public with her phenomenal vocal gifts (she had a range of two and a half octaves) and her exceptional musicality.

Pauline was not pretty, she was tiny with an enormous nose and mouth, bulging eyes, and wide hips, but the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset, enchanted by her talent and intellect, proposed to her. She rejected him and, taking George Sand’s advice, married the theater impresario and liberal journalist and translator (Dostoevsky read Don Quixote in his French rendering) Louis Viardot, who was more than twenty years her senior. Le tout Paris gathered in their salon, and the brilliant Pauline, who also played piano and composed, was its main star.

La Revue indépendante was an influential promoter of socialist ideas in France and Europe. Amazingly, by hook or crook, the journal reached St. Petersburg, where it was devoured by progressives. Given the Russians’ adoration of George Sand, the adventures of Consuelo/Pauline Viardot were a hot topics in the Russian capital.

By this time, Turgenev was a rather well known poet—tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, and a dandy (multicolored vests, lorgnette). However, his domineering mother thought he was too flighty.

His personal life was confused: he was having an affair with a sister of Mikhail Bakunin, later a notorious anarchist (Bakunin had more than brotherly feelings for her as well), but had a child with a serf laundress of his mother. He did not renounce his daughter, Pelagia, which would have been unseemly, given her strong resemblance to him.

Turgenev’s life changed in an instant when Pauline Viardot came to perform in St. Petersburg in the fall of 1843. She came to the capital because Nicholas I wanted a court Italian opera—he sang and played flute and trombone and loved Italian music. On his orders, the best singers were brought to Russia for huge fees. It was a cultural revolution for St. Petersburg, and the public went wild with heated arguments and endless gossip.

Viardot, who came with her husband, immediately conquered St. Petersburg; audiences “groaned with delight.” Turgenev, who had not been a major music lover before, began an adroit campaign on the famous singer. First he arranged to be in a hunting party outside the capital with Louis Viardot, who was as passionate about hunting as Turgenev; then he attended a performance of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia with Viardot singing; and at last he was presented to the star—all in the course of a few days.

Many years later, Pauline Viardot recalled her first meeting with Turgenev with a laugh: “He was introduced as a young Russian landowner, a good hunter, splendid raconteur, and bad poet.”⁸ Turgenev was enchanted by her, but no one could have predicted that their relationship would last for forty years.

Avdotya Panaeva (Nekrasov’s outspoken common-law wife) disapproved: “He shouted about his love for Viardot everywhere, and among friends he talked of nothing but Viardot.” Even the critic Belinsky, who liked the writer, once reprimanded Turgenev: “Really, how can one believe in a love as voluble as yours?”⁹

Gradually, everyone believed in it, and most importantly, so did Pauline and her husband. A strange ménage à trois formed. Many assumed that it was purely platonic on Turgenev’s side, and that Louis Viardot had homoerotic feelings for the writer. The union turned out to be exceptionably stable, and wags hinted that it was fueled by Turgenev’s wealth (his mother died in 1850, leaving a large fortune) and fame.

Turgenev’s popularity increased rapidly. His A Sportsman’s Sketches, which attracted a lot of attention when published in 1852, was rumored to have hastened the abolition of serfdom in Russia. Rudin, Asya, First Love, Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, and Fathers and Sons followed, each sparking a lively debate, and soon Turgenev was the recognized leader of Russian prose. But his life was forever tied to the Viardot family—he went wherever they did: France, then Baden-Baden, and then Paris, where Turgenev died in the Viardots’ summer villa in 1883, having outlived Louis Viardot briefly.

This union existed under the aegis of George Sand, who felt sincere amity for Turgenev, valuing him as a writer and human being: she thought him cheerful, simple, and modest (“He was extremely surprised when I told him he was a great artist and great poet”).

Leo Tolstoy’s opinion was rather different, as recorded in his diary in 1856: “His whole life is pretended simplicity.” Many other Russian observers described Turgenev as capricious, irresponsible, and vain. Foreigners, on the contrary, were all charmed by him: for them the gray-haired Russian giant was a fairy-tale character.

. . .

Turgenev wanted to live a life that was free, elegant, comfortable, and situated in the center of European culture. Before him, no Russian writer lived that way—nor has any since. Turgenev managed to achieve all this in no small part thanks to his relationship with the Viardots, whose salon was a magnet for French celebrities. One starstruck Russian woman described an evening she spent at the Viardots’, when the other guests included Gustave Flaubert, the violinist Pablo Sarasate, and the composers Charles Gounod and Camille Saint-Saëns: “White lacquered furniture upholstered in pale silk left the center of the room open. To the left of the grand piano two steps led to the picture gallery, illuminated from above. There was an organ in there and a few, but very valuable, paintings … Mme Viardot came to the middle of the room … After the aria from Verdi’s opera, came Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig,’ accompanied by Saint-Saëns.”¹⁰

Turgenev took great pleasure in the monthly “Flaubert dinners,” held in a private room of a Parisian restaurant for five famous writers: two close friends, Flaubert and Turgenev, and Zola, Alfonse Daudet, and Edmond Goncourt. Daudet recalled that they spoke of their own works and those of others (each time at least one of the participants brought along a just-published book), about women, and also about their ills, “the body that is becoming a burden like a ball and chain on a convict’s leg. Those were sad confessions of men who had turned forty!”¹¹ Turgenev concentrated on the caviar, nevertheless.

The writers began their evenings at seven, and the feast would still be going strong at two a.m. The loud-spoken Flaubert would remove his jacket, the others following his lead; Turgenev, who suffered from gout, would lie down on the couch.

At those moments Turgenev undoubtedly imagined himself on the literary Olympus, one of the masters of the cultural universe. I saw similar emotions on the face of the poet Joseph Brodsky when he appeared in New York in the company of Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott (four Nobel laureates!).

Everything Turgenev wrote was instantly translated into several languages. For good reason—and like Brodsky a century later—Turgenev considered himself an arbiter and connoisseur of what contemporary Russian literature would please foreigners and what would not. He was a bit condescending about Tolstoy: “Foreigners don’t appreciate him. Childhood and Adolescence was translated into English and did not do well: it was taken for an imitation of Dickens. I wanted to translate War and Peace into French, but skipping all the philosophizing, for I know the French: they won’t see the good beyond the boring and silly.”

When Tolstoy rejected the radical editing, Turgenev was hurt, telling a friend, “Someone else translated it, and probably the French won’t read it.” Turgenev considered himself an excellent editor. He was particularly proud of his editing work on the books by two great Russian poets who were not so lucky with publications in their lifetime: Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet.

At a dinner in his honor in 1856 when he came to visit St. Petersburg, after many toasts, Turgenev responded with an allegedly impromptu gem:

All this praise is undeserved

But one thing you must admit:

I forced Tyutchev to unzip

And I cleaned Fet’s pants.

This auto-epigram was greeted with howls of laughter from the bibulous writers, who understood the references: Turgenev had persuaded Tyutchev, engrossed in political and social intrigues, to agree to issue his verse, to which he was rather indifferent. It was edited by Turgenev and Nekrasov.

As for Fet, he had also given Turgenev a free hand, but when the book appeared in 1855, Fet found it “as cleaned up as it was disfigured.”¹² Tyutchev too felt that Turgenev’s editing was heavy-handed, and that “many of his corrections ruined things.”¹³

Turgenev was friendly with everyone, but he also quarreled with everyone at some point—Nekrasov, Fet, Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Essentially, it was a conflict between a Westerner to the marrow of his bones and nationalists, whatever they may have called themselves. The suspicious Fet thought that Turgenev had become a Westernizer “under the influence of Mme Viardot.” Turgenev readily agreed: “I do not undertake anything important in my life without the advice of Mme Viardot.”

Turgenev’s Russian friends nagged him to return to his homeland to live, instead of just visiting. He assured them that he missed Russia very much, but he always found an excuse why he couldn’t move just then. He did admit once that he felt “family” was not Russians but the Viardots: “If they were to move tomorrow to the most impossible city, say, Copenhagen, I would follow.”¹⁴

The main magnet was Pauline Viardot, and not only for her vocal genius. She drew well, read five languages, knew Russian well, and had a sophisticated taste in art and literature. Viardot once confided in a Russian friend, “Not a single line of Turgenev’s gets into print without his showing it to me first. You Russians do not know how much you owe me that Turgenev continues to write and work.”

Turgenev entrusted the upbringing of his daughter (whose name he changed from Pelagia to Paulina) to the Viardots. When visiting France, the poet Fet listened in amazement as Paulina “quite sweetly declaimed Molière’s poetry; but because she looked just like Turgenev in a skirt, she could make no claim on prettiness.”¹⁵ The girl had forgotten how to speak Russian.

The girl’s upbringing led to a furious row with Leo Tolstoy that almost ended in a duel with rifles. Turgenev was boasting in company that included Tolstoy how Paulina did charity work: she mended the clothing of the poor. Tolstoy (whom Turgenev dubbed a troglodyte for his directness and coarseness) sarcastically countered that “a dressed up girl, with filthy and stinking rags on her lap, is playing an insincere, theatrical scene.”

The argument suddenly flew out of control, and although bloodshed was avoided it left a break in relations between the two writers that lasted twenty years. The true cause of the altercation was still the same: the Christian anarchist Tolstoy hated Turgenev’s liberal posturing, and the animosity was returned. The role of women in society was part of the conflict.

Turgenev’s ideal woman was a mix of the real Pauline Viardot, her depiction in the novels of George Sand, and a big dose of Pushkin’s Tatiana from Eugene Onegin. All of “Turgenev’s maidens” are like that—pure, idealistic, and strong. The men in Turgenev’s works were mostly weak and indecisive. A pervasive melancholy envelops Turgenev’s prose, but there is always an acute sense of the bigger social issues important for Russia. That’s what made Turgenev’s writing so topical, and his eye for a telling detail and fine craftsmanship ensured lasting success with Western readers. But his moderation was ultimately his undoing.

In June 1880, Turgenev appeared as guest of honor at the unveiling of the first monument to Pushkin in Moscow. As a natural centrist, he found himself at the crossroads of clashing political forces. Alexander II wanted on this occasion to send an encouraging signal to the Russian intelligentsia. The unveiling of the Pushkin monument was taken under royal patronage.

The progressive intellectuals also wanted to be heard. For the liberal elite, the event was an opportunity to stress the independence of culture. In this situation, Turgenev appeared to be the spokesman of choice for all parties concerned, since he was looked upon as Pushkin’s successor.

But in Russia, being a moderate liberal and Westernizer is the most precarious position, especially in tense moments. This is where Turgenev lost. At the solemn convocation in the auditorium of the Nobility Assembly, with le tout Moscou present, Turgenev gave a mellow speech in which he took neither the side of the government (which Alexander II had expected of him) nor the side of the opposition (as the students present had hoped).

For all his admiration of Pushkin, Turgenev praised him cautiously, since he knew that Pushkin was not particularly famous in the West. The disappointed audience reacted with little enthusiasm. Turgenev was perceived as one of his own indecisive characters. But the true blow came from Dostoevsky, who delivered his Pushkin oration the next day in the same hall.

In his fiery speech, Dostoevsky declared Pushkin a world genius who was greater than Shakespeare or Cervantes because of his special, somehow purely Russian quality of “universal receptivity.” That was exactly what the whole audience—conservatives and progressives alike—desperately wanted to hear.

Turgenev’s careful equivocations were rejected, while Dostoevsky’s emotionally charged exaggerations carried the day. The stark contrast between the big, handsome Turgenev and the small, emaciated, hunched, and ugly Dostoevsky, whose coat drooped as if on a hanger, worked in the latter’s favor: Dostoevsky was one of their own, a Russian sufferer, while Turgenev looked like a wealthy tourist from Paris.

The audience was spellbound by the extraordinary nervous energy of Dostoevsky’s delivery. When he concluded with the words that Pushkin “carried away with him to the grave a certain great mystery. And now we must uncover it without him,” a hysterical cry came from the crowd—“You have uncovered it!”—which was picked up by other loud voices: “You have! You have!”

People in the audience shouted and wept and embraced one another. Dostoevsky wrote to his wife, “I hurried to save myself backstage, but they forced their way in, especially the women. They kissed my hands, tormented me. Students ran in. One of them, in tears, fell before me in hysteria and then passed out. It was a total, complete victory!”¹⁶

While he was speaking, someone managed to sneak out and get an enormous laurel wreath for him; as he reported triumphantly in the same letter, “a multitude of ladies (more than a hundred) rushed up on the stage and crowned me in front of the entire audience with the wreath.” (A telling detail: when the volunteers were bringing in the laurel wreath, they bumped into Turgenev, and one of the women pushed him aside, muttering scornfully, “It’s not for you!”)

Turgenev reacted angrily to his defeat. When he returned to Paris, he told friends how much he “hated all the lies and falsehoods of Dostoevsky’s sermon” and how everyone “seemed to lose their minds, awed by the incongruous nonsense from Dostoevsky, how all of them, as if drunk or on drugs, practically climbed the walls … and cried, and wept, and embraced as if it were Easter.”¹⁷

Some seven months later, Dostoevsky died in St. Petersburg at the age of fifty-nine of hemorrhage in his throat, and two and a half years after that, in Bougival outside Paris, in terrible suffering from spinal cancer alleviated only with massive doses of morphine, Turgenev died at the age of sixty-four.

A few years before his death, Turgenev wrote in his diary, “Midnight. I am at my desk again; below, my poor friend is singing something in her completely broken voice; and my soul is darker than the darkest night … The grave seems in a hurry to swallow me up: like an instant, the day flies by, empty, meaningless, colorless … I have no right to live, nor any desire to do so; there is nothing more to do, nothing to expect, nothing even to want.”¹⁸

CHAPTER 10

Herzen, Tolstoy, and the Women’s Issue

After the death of Nicholas I in 1855, the moral climate changed: the poet Tyutchev called it a thaw. A contemporary marveled, “Everyone senses that a huge stone has been lifted from each of us, and that it is easier to breathe.”¹ The new monarch, Alexander II, sent clear liberal signals.

Expectation of reforms was in the air, clearly needed after the disastrous Crimean War. From the abolition of serfs to fashions and hairdos, everything was subject to debate. Suddenly, there was talk of the “new man.”

While Russia was backward, the Russian elite was in the avant-garde when it came to navel gazing and sophisticated emotions. While millions of Russian serfs lived under medieval laws, a handful of refined minds experimented with new relations between the sexes and the “emancipation of the flesh.”

Russia had no real bourgeoisie, but the radical intellectuals were already rejecting bourgeois views of morality. The American cultural historian Marshall Berman dubbed this “the modernism of underdevelopment,” when culturally innovative models were debated in a bubble, based on social fantasies and dreams.²

One of those isolated dreamers was the great Russian dissident and social philosopher Alexander Herzen, born in the fateful year of confrontation with Napoleon, 1812 (he was saved from a burning house as an infant during the fire of Moscow), to the family of Moscow millionaire Ivan Yakovlev, who named his illegitimate but beloved son (his mother was a poor German woman) Herzen, from the German das Herz, the heart.

Brilliantly educated, Herzen grew up a rebel; reading Pushkin, Schiller, and Rousseau (he knew German and French fluently from childhood and then added Italian and English) awakened in him, as he later recalled, “an insuperable hatred of all slavery and all tyranny.” Inevitably, Herzen was sent by Nicholas I into exile in the provinces. In 1847, Herzen and his family fled to Europe: “I was beckoned by distant vistas, open struggle and free speech.”

Herzen was a short, plump gentleman, clean shaven, with long hair combed straight back in the Moscow manner, very mobile, and his constant inner agitation made him speak standing, quickly, in a loud voice. When he settled in Paris, Herzen transformed himself: he grew a stylish beard, cut his hair, and traded the clumsy Moscow long frock coat for a fashionable Parisian jacket.

Cosmopolitan at heart, Herzen quickly plunged headlong into the turbulent life in Paris—political, cultural, and social—that was in such sharp contrast with his Moscow existence, swallowing up all the latest books and splashing happily in the “sparkling sea,” as he called it, of the European press. He entered Parisian democratic and socialist circles, and leftists of every rank, stripe, and nationality delighted in Herzen’s heartfelt speeches denouncing serfdom and other horrors of the autocratic Russia they all hated.

It was difficult to make such an impression on this brilliant group of ambitious and confident activists who lived in a dizzying world of bold ideas and pitiless polemics, and Herzen would not have been able to do it, had he not arrived in Paris a very wealthy man.

In Moscow, Herzen inherited a lot of money from his father, but that just alienated him from his old friends there. Herzen recalled that “the appearance of some silver tray and candelabra in his new household stunned his friends into silence: sincerity and fun vanished as soon as they encountered ready comfort.”³

On the contrary, in the West Herzen’s money not only made him accepted even in the democratic milieu, but it also allowed him to launch his revolutionary activity: he founded the Free Russian Press in London, which printed antigovernment leaflets, brochures, and books, and subsequently the dissident almanac Polar Star and then the first Russian revolutionary newspaper, The Bell (1857–1867).

The Bell’s circulation was 2,500, some of which reached Russia, where the paper was read with trepidation and acute attention, even in the tsar’s court. They said that Alexander II sometimes asked close friends, “Have you read the eighth issue? How about the tenth?”⁴ Everyone knew he meant The Bell. It was a historic breakthrough for Russian dissident literature.

The tumultuous cosmopolitan life in the West transformed Herzen’s wife, Natalie, too, and it led to a family drama. In an ordinary family it would probably have remained a private affair, but it prompted Herzen to write a masterpiece of the Russian memoir genre, his magnum opus, My Past and Thoughts.

Natalie was his cousin. Like Herzen, she was illegitimate, and she was brought up by a wealthy aunt, which created psychological issues. Beautiful and intelligent, she imagined that everyone was mocking her, humiliating her, keeping her illiterate, while her calling was to astonish the world: “My cheeks burned, I was hurrying somewhere, I could see my paintings, my students—but they wouldn’t give me a piece of paper or a pencil … My desire to get out into a different world grew stronger and stronger and along with it grew my scorn for my prison and its cruel sentry.”⁵

When she married Herzen, he and his friends put her on a romantic pedestal: they all tried “to prove to her that she was immaculate in every action.” One friend kept telling Herzen, “You are a pig before your wife.”⁶

Belonging to the “fasting girl” type, fashionable in mid-nineteenth-century Europe—thin, small, and introverted creatures, whom many found to be incredibly spiritual—Natalie Herzen made it a habit to lecture her female friends in a smooth, quiet voice on the lofty purpose of women, annoying them no end.

It was his wife who pushed Herzen out into Europe once he got his inheritance. In Paris, Natalie Herzen, according to friends, changed from a “quiet, thoughtful romantic lady” into a “brilliant tourist.”⁷

Among the new admirers of the Herzen family were the German émigré poet Georg Herwegh and his wife. Herwegh was famous for his passionate political poems and pamphlets, which received the approval of Karl Marx himself. The great Heinrich Heine called Herwegh the “iron lark” of the revolution. He was very attractive, with a dusky face and fiery eyes, soft, long hair, and a silky beard.

At first relations between the Herzens and the Herweghs were idyllic: the men called each other “my double,” “my twin,” and the women discussed the possibility of communal living, both families with their children. The inspiring works of Rousseau and George Sand were reread and discussed. It ended with Herwegh and Natalie becoming lovers, although she did not want to leave Herzen.

Feeling a “revulsion for bourgeois virtues,” as an observer put it, Natalie Herzen imagined that this situation would work out well and that they would create a great new model of family relations (as some now assume, on a bisexual basis) before which “one day people will prostrate themselves, blinded by our love, as if by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”⁸

But the progressive Herzen, who readily recognized the right of every woman to enjoy free love in theory, somehow recoiled from this prospect. The duality of his position was later described ironically by Dostoevsky: “He rejected the foundations of the previous society, denied family, and still was, I believe, a good father and husband. He denied private property, and while waiting for its abolition managed to arrange his affairs and enjoyed his prosperity abroad. He fomented revolutions and incited others but at the same time loved comfort and family peace.”

Dostoevsky was unduly sarcastic. It is easy to accuse Herzen of inconsistency or even hypocrisy, but the letters and diaries of the couple show how sincerely and strongly they believed in new, elevated forms of family life and how terribly they suffered when their fantasies were shattered.

At first Herzen and Herwegh planned to solve the conflict with a duel. But instead Herzen imprudently decided to make the affair public, wanting Jules Michelet and Pierre Proudhon, whom he called the “generals of democracy,” and the great George Sand, for Herzen and his circle “the highest authority on everything to do with women,” to rule on the situation.

Nothing but a Europe-wide scandal came of it. The “generals” refused the invitation to be on the jury d’honneur, and the composer Richard Wagner, to whom Herzen also wrote about the affair, supported Herwegh. Karl Marx, who disliked Herzen politically and personally, gloated, “Herwegh not only made Herzen a cuckold, but he milked him for 80,000 francs.”

The unfortunate Natalie Herzen died in 1852 of tuberculosis, leaving her husband inconsolable to the end of his days. But Herzen, in his youth convinced of the “unlimited value of the personality” (particularly his own), immediately placed his personal catastrophe into the broader context of the crisis of contemporary European culture. “Everything has collapsed—public and private, European revolution and home and hearth, freedom of the world and personal happiness.” That big idea fueled Herzen’s innovative memoirs My Past and Thoughts, which he began right after his wife’s death as a confessional about his family’s tragedy. Over the course of fifteen years of work it became a “biography of humanity,” as he put it. “Jealousy … Fidelity … Betrayal … Purity … Dark forces, threatening words, which caused rivers of tears, rivers of blood—words that make us shudder, like memories of inquisition, torture, plague … and yet words beneath which, as if beneath the sword of Damocles, lived and lives the family.”

My Past and Thoughts makes for difficult, occasionally irritating, but ultimately rewarding reading: an odd mix of sharp observations colored by the author’s inimitable irony; vivid descriptions of historical events; subtle landscapes; and witty philosophical and political digressions. The author is in continual dialogue with the reader, who delights in Herzen’s speech—voluble, sarcastic, tragic.

Herzen inserted fragments from letters and diaries into the text, not in their original form but edited to suit the needs of the narrative. Herzen was just as free with historical facts; he admitted that his memoirs “are not historical monograph, but the reflection of history in a man who accidentally ended up in its path.”

Herzen used the word “accidentally” coquettishly: he expended superhuman efforts to put himself “into” history—not just political history, but artistic as well—and My Past and Thoughts provides a series of sharp vignettes: Nicholas I, loathed by Herzen, looks like a “shorn and slimy jellyfish with a mustache”; his son, the future Alexander II, is more kindly drawn—“His features expressed kindness and weakness … The few words he spoke to me were gentle … without the father’s habit of frightening the listener into a faint.”

In My Past and Thoughts, Herzen predicted that if democracy prevailed in America, “people there would not become happier, but they would be more sated. Their satisfaction will be flatter, poorer and drier than the one borne in the ideals of romantic Europe, but with it there will be no tsars, no centralization, and perhaps, no hunger.”

The emotional center of My Past and Thoughts is the passionate and frank description of the love drama of Herzen and Natalie (“The poor sufferer—how much I participated in her murder, loving her limitlessly!”), a drama presented as the result not just of mere personal rivalry but, more grandiosely, of the clash of reactionary and progressive forces: “And my hearth was extinguished by the crush of two wheels of world history … Life deceived me, history deceived me.”

. . .

Herzen died in Paris in 1870, politically marginalized, just two and a half months short of his fifty-eighth birthday. In his lifetime, the full text of My Past and Thoughts did not appear in print: Herzen considered the portrayal of his intimate life a tad too frank. Turgenev, who read the manuscript, given to him by Herzen’s daughter six years after the writer’s death, was disturbed: “It is written in fire, tears, and blood.”⁹ But “I am definitely against publication, even though as a reader, I regret it.”¹⁰ The complete text was not published until fifty years after Herzen’s death, in 1919–1920. In the postrevolutionary flames, Herzen’s lyrical outpouring had little impact. Many considered them old-fashioned.

Leo Tolstoy, a great admirer of Herzen, often expressed regret about the unfortunate fate of his prose in Russia. In his own works, Tolstoy always strived for topicality.

When Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina began serialization in 1875 in the conservative journal the Russian Herald (he had ended his collaboration with the liberal Contemporary), it met a squall of negative reviews. Turgenev was outraged: “With his talent, to wander into the high society swamp and lose his way there, treating all that piffle not with humor but seriously—what nonsense!”¹¹

The liberal Nekrasov nailed Anna Karenina with an epigram:

Tolstoy, you proved with patience, talent, and great delay

That if she is a wife and mother, a woman should not stray.

One influential critic wrote that Tolstoy’s new novel “arouses disgust in everyone,” because instead of genuine love he depicts “naked and purely animal sensuality”; the critic saw nothing but “unfettered lust” in the relations between Anna and her lover, Vronsky.

The most scathing (unprinted but popular) remark came from the idol of the progressives, the satirical writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, who called it “a novel about improving the life of genitalia.” He added in a letter to a friend, “I find it vile and immoral. And the conservative party is using it and gloating. Can you imagine turning Tolstoy’s bovine novel into some kind of political banner?”¹²

These angry words about Tolstoy’s novel being used as a political banner for the conservatives explain the liberal outrage over Anna Karenina. As contemporaries recalled, Alexander II “hated learned women,” seeing them as both potential and actual revolutionaries.¹³ His high officials were in complete agreement on this. The liberal press and public opinion pushed for women’s access to higher education. The wary government did not give in.

In 1873 a special commission, which included the minister of public education, the minister of internal affairs, and also the chief of gendarmes, sent Alexander II a report on women’s education and the “women’s issue,” which the commission felt was being used by enemies of autocracy to push through demands of “a utopian, almost revolutionary character: to make a woman’s rights equal to that of men, to allow her to participate in politics, and even give the right to free love, which destroys the family and turns extreme licentiousness into a principle.”¹⁴

For the authors of the report and Alexander II, who approved it, women’s radicalism in both sex and politics was equally frightening and repulsive. A noted conservative journalist, Prince Vladimir Meshchersky (a known homosexual in St. Petersburg) maintained that female students were “the most fanatical, and one must truthfully say, the ugliest maidens, shorn, in blue spectacles and men’s jackets,”¹⁵ for whom education was just a smokescreen for sexual and political anarchy.

That is why the conservative camp hailed Anna Karenina, a love story in high circles, in which the heroine, seeking sexual independence, is punished by society and consequently throws herself under a train.

Reading Anna Karenina, explained a right-wing critic, “you are freed from mediocrity and filth, you stop breathing the fetid air of taverns, hospitals, and prisons, where most of contemporary belles-lettres are gasping.” At last one could enjoy fine descriptions of the life of aristocratic salons, ladies’ boudoirs, fashionable restaurants, and the races.

The left fumed over why Tolstoy did not write about the simple folk or, for example, students: “What a shame that Tolstoy has no ideals! … He cares more about a she-buffalo than an advanced woman.” The ultra-conservative poet Fet reported those liberal opinions to Tolstoy in a letter and added a response to them: “Because a she-buffalo is perfection in its species, while your advanced woman is God knows what.”¹⁶

Tolstoy chose the epigraph to Anna Karenina from the Bible: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.” The full quote is this: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith The Lord.” A lively polemic over the epigraph began immediately, and it continues to this day. Is the unfaithful Anna a criminal and God punishes her justly? Or is she innocent, and it is not the business of people to judge her?

In other words, does Tolstoy have sympathy for Anna, or did the “rubbishy old man” (as protofeminist Anna Akhmatova angrily called him) truly believe, as Akhmatova maintained, that “if a woman leaves her rightful husband and joins another man, she inevitably becomes a prostitute”?¹⁷

Tolstoy avoided a straightforward comment on the novel. “If I wanted to summarize what I wanted to express in the novel, then I would have to write exactly the same novel that I have written, from the beginning.”

We can assume that the epigraph from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans was chosen by Tolstoy after reading Schopenhauer’s philosophical treatise The World as Will and Representation, where this passage is interpreted. At the same time, Tolstoy was responding to the misogynistic pamphlet by Alexandre Dumas fils, “L’homme—femme,” which posed the question: What should be done with an unfaithful woman—forgive her, throw her out, kill her?

The highly moral Dumas strongly suggested killing unfaithful wives, but Tolstoy, generally very sympathetic to antifeminist ideas (“Women’s only purpose is to give birth and bring up children”), in this case was arguably mercifully inclined to leave the act of punishment to God.

. . .

Tolstoy’s views obviously evolved over time: in his most sensational work on relations between the sexes, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), the hero kills his wife, whom he suspects of having an affair with the violinist with whom she plays Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, “a terrible thing,” and the court finds him not guilty.

In his feverish monologue, the protagonist explains his crime by the fact that women have acquired “a terrible power over people” in modern society: “Women, like empresses, hold 90 percent of the human race in slavery and hard labor. And all because they have been humiliated, deprived of equal rights with men. And so they get their revenge by acting on our sensuality, ensnaring us in their nets.”

According to Tolstoy, that shameful and immoral “slavery of sensuality” can be avoided only by total abstinence. Akhmatova commented on the late Tolstoy’s idée fixe skeptically: the old writer, settled in his famous estate, Yasnaya Polyana, stopped lusting after the village girls and therefore decided to forbid the rest of the world to have sex too.¹⁸

In this case Akhmatova was wrong, if only because Tolstoy was still in his fifties when he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and he had no problems with his sexual drive, judging by his diaries. The philosophy of the story is, of course, more complex, expressing the quasi-Buddhist idea that “if passions are destroyed including the last, most powerful one—physical love, then the prophecy will come to pass, people will be united into one, the goal of humanity will be reached, and there will be no reason for it to live.”

The diaries also suggest that while one of the impulses for writing the story was, in fact, autobiographical, it was rather opposite to the reason Akhmatova attributed to Tolstoy.

Tolstoy had been waging a fierce psychological war with his wife, Sophia, a strong woman who tried to hold on to her position in the family vis-à-vis the dictator and tyrant her husband was.

When they married in 1862, he was thirty-four and she was eighteen, and in the subsequent thirty years of marriage, she bore him thirteen children; as one of their sons calculated, she was pregnant for almost ten years and breast-fed children for more than thirteen years, and also “managed to run the complex household of a large family and copied War and Peace and Anna Karenina and other works by hand eight, ten, and sometimes twenty times each.”¹⁹

Sophia resisted her husband’s intentions to turn her into a mere machine for producing and feeding children (with additional functions as housekeeper, secretary, clerk, and literary agent). There were endless arguments and quarrels, accompanied by Sophia’s hysterics and nervous collapses. Time and again, Tolstoy would angrily write in his diary that the break with his wife was “complete.” Things never reached divorce, even though each threatened to leave, and Sophia often mentioned suicide, a terrible sin for a Christian.

Tolstoy, the more powerful figure, always won. But there was one sphere—sex—where Sophia could get her revenge. In his youth, Tolstoy caroused and debauched, as did everyone in his milieu. Toward the end of his life, he admitted to Maxim Gorky, “I was an insatiable … ‘—’ using a salty word at the end.”²⁰

Gorky insisted (and he knew!) that even with Tolstoy’s “passionate nature,” his wife “was his only woman for almost a half century.”²¹ It should be added that Sophia, according to contemporaries, was not only energetic and light on her feet, but amazingly youthful. When Tolstoy was writing The Kreutzer Sonata, she was in her early forties, but “there wasn’t a single wrinkle on her smooth, rosy white face,”²² as one of her daughters wrote.

Sophia did not use powder or any makeup and bore her imposing, full figure with grace and quiet confidence. In conversations, she liked to stress her youthfulness—and Tolstoy’s age. She continued to arouse her husband and, well aware of it, turned sex into a weapon (both wrote about this in their diaries).

In one typical entry, Tolstoy described bitterly that he had asked his wife to join him that night but she “with cold anger and the desire to hurt me, refused.” Tolstoy was infuriated that Sophia was turning conjugal sex “into a lure and a toy.” The Kreutzer Sonata (like other works of the period on the humiliating power of lust and sex—The Devil and Father Sergius) was his revenge and exorcism.

The story became a major public event: in Russia (as in the West) questions of sex were discussed avidly and turned into a battlefield between conservatives and liberals.

The Kreutzer Sonata was translated into the main European languages and became perhaps the most popular work by Tolstoy in the West. In Russia, where it was blocked by the censors, the novella was distributed in thousands of handwritten copies, and it was read aloud and debated passionately. “It sometimes seemed that the public, forgetting its personal cares, lived only for the literature of Count Tolstoy … The most important political events rarely captured everyone with such force.”

The “Tolstoyans” (followers of Tolstoy who lived in quasi-socialist communes, working the land, practicing nonviolent resistance to evil and moral self-perfection) discussed The Kreutzer Sonata with particular fervor. The young women in these communes swore, after a collective reading, that they would never marry, and if they were forced, they would rather drown themselves. There were instances of young Tolstoyans castrating themselves to escape the temptation of marriage.

Tolstoy’s wife was deeply wounded by the popularity of The Kreutzer Sonata: she thought—not without reason—that the whole world interpreted it as a direct reflection of their family situation. Sophia was told that even Emperor Alexander II said, “I feel sorry for his poor wife”²³ upon reading the work.

So Sophia had a brilliant idea: she would go to St. Petersburg to get permission for publication of The Kreutzer Sonata from the tsar. If she succeeded, everyone would realize she was no victim.

Her plan worked. Alexander received her in the palace and after a friendly chat gave his consent to the publication of the novella in the next volume of Tolstoy’s collected works. Sophia was triumphant: “I, a woman, got what no one else could achieve.”

She was especially pleased that Alexander found her “young and beautiful” at forty-seven. Naturally, that provoked displeasure in Tolstoy, who was pathologically jealous. Hearing his wife’s joyous account of her meeting with the emperor, Tolstoy grumbled angrily that “before he and Sovereign had ignored each other and now this new turn of events could create problems.”

Tolstoy’s jealousy finally brought his family to the brink of disaster, in a classic example of life imitating art. Like the protagonist in his novella, Tolstoy grew jealous of a musician, the composer and pianist Sergei Taneyev.

The Neoclassicist Taneyev was often called the Russian Brahms (even though he abhorred Brahms’s music), and after the death in 1893 of his teacher and idol Tchaikovsky, Taneyev became the guru of musical Moscow. As a composer, Taneyev always stood apart: he had a special knowledge of the polyphonic technique of the old masters (Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso), and he used it in his own work.

Short, heavyset, bearded, nearsighted, and dumpy, Taneyev was a freethinker. During the census of 1897 he intended to fill in the religion question with “heretic not believing in God.” He also openly despised the Romanovs. He liked to tell the story of how in 1881, during the celebrations of the coronation of Alexander III, he was asked to conduct a concert in Moscow in the presence of the emperor, and he “intentionally put on a boot with a hole specially for the tsar.” “Alexander III gave me a gold ruble,” Taneyev recalled with a laugh, “and I immediately gave it to the doorman as a tip.”²⁴

One of his favorite writers was Tolstoy, whom he had met in the early 1890s. Tolstoy was a fair amateur pianist and even composed a sweet little waltz, written down by Taneyev, who was a guest at Yasnaya Polyana in the summers of 1895 and 1896.

Neither man liked the late Beethoven, Wagner, or the “modernists” Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy. But Tolstoy found Palestrina, adored by Taneyev, boring, and he was rather skeptical about Taneyev’s music, unabashed at telling him so to his face.

. . .

Soon, Taneyev became “disgusting” to Tolstoy, and in his diary Tolstoy compared the clumsy, shy, and kindly composer to a rooster: his wife had invented an “affair” for herself with Taneyev, and Tolstoy could not stand it.

Tolstoy ignored the fact that Taneyev was a completely asexual virgin. Sophia’s tenderness toward the eccentric composer was more maternal than anything else. Taneyev had a calming effect on Sophia, and lofty music, which he embodied, gave her the illusion of an emotional harbor, a respite from the stormy atmosphere created by her tyrannical husband.

A controlling person, Tolstoy found the situation intolerable: he could not sleep, he wept, he kept arguing with Sophia, trying to separate her from that “fat musician.” Sophia fought back aggressively, “I will love people who are good and kind, and not you. You’re a beast.” It went on for years, while the unsuspecting Taneyev calmly continued visiting the Tolstoy house and Sophia attended his concerts in Moscow.

What must have infuriated Tolstoy most was that Taneyev was a silent rebuke, the ideal Tolstoyan, a follower of his moral teachings: he lived simply, did not care about money, and did not chase after fame and glory; nor did he smoke or drink, and he was a vegetarian, like Tolstoy.

But while Tolstoy proclaimed in The Kreutzer Sonata that the key to the moral revival of humanity was celibacy, the writer himself remained a prisoner of sexual passions. And here was some musician (“All musicians are stupid,” Tolstoy said, “and the more talented the musician, the stupider”),²⁵ almost thirty years younger, for whom the problem simply did not exist.

Looking at Taneyev, the world-famed prophet and stern judge of tsars saw himself as pathetic and ridiculous. His bedroom was his gallows: although only he and his wife knew it, he feared that everyone knew (or guessed). His dilemma was an irresolvable contradiction between his writing and his lifestyle, a fundamental problem that eventually drove Tolstoy to flee his house in 1910 and contributed to his death that same year at the age of eighty-two.

CHAPTER 11

Tchaikovsky and Homosexuality

in Imperial Russia

A paradox mentioned frequently by contemporaries of Leo Tolstoy: that stern brute would burst into tears at the least provocation. He was particularly moved by sophisticated classical music, whose right to exist he always stubbornly denied: Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin.

The sole contemporary composer who could wring tears from the great writer was Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky. In December 1876 a private performance of Tchaikovsky’s music was arranged for Tolstoy at the Moscow Conservatory. The writer, listening to the soulful Andante from the First String Quartet, “began sobbing”¹ (according to Tchaikovsky), thereby pleasing the composer enormously.

Fired up by the idea of “gabbing” about music with Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy visited him several times, which made the composer (who considered Tolstoy a “semigod”) “terribly flattered and proud.”² But Tchaikovsky was a nervous and fragile person, and these contacts with Tolstoy ultimately brought “nothing but difficulty and torment, like any acquaintance,”³ as he confessed in a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck.

Tolstoy’s drive and Tchaikovsky’s neurotic reticence clashed. Right off the bat, Tolstoy ranted about Beethoven, putting Tchaikovsky off: “To lower an acknowledged genius to the level of their lack of understanding is a quality of intellectually limited people.”⁴

Paradoxically, Tolstoy, justly celebrated for the psychological insights in his work, did not do so well in person with Tchaikovsky. He did not notice—or simply ignored—the extreme nervousness of that small, delicate, and seemingly acquiescent man with his neat gray beard. That is obvious from Tolstoy’s later description of his meetings with the composer: “I think there was a bond between us.” (If there was anything, it was lingering irritation on the part of Tchaikovsky.)

Tolstoy pursued his uninvited expansion into Tchaikovsky’s realm, sending him an old edition of Russian folk songs, which he himself loved (he even figured out the piano accompaniment to one of them), with a suggestion that the composer write arrangements of them and with precise instructions how to do it: “In the Mozart-Haydn mode, not in the Beethoven-Schumann-Berlioz mode, so artificial and pretentious.”⁵

Bearing in mind Tchaikovsky’s shyness and his admiration for Tolstoy the writer, the response from the usually polite composer was uncharacteristically direct. Tchaikovsky wrote Tolstoy that the folk songs he had sent him (“an amazing treasure,” Tolstoy had called it) were recorded “by an untutored hand and so bear only the traces of their original beauty.”⁶ He flatly refused to execute Tolstoy’s idea about arranging the songs.

Still, Tchaikovsky buffered his refusal in some pleasantries and a request for a photograph as a memento of their meetings. But the angered Tolstoy did not oblige with his photograph, even though he routinely sent out hundreds to fans, and began denigrating the composer’s works as an “artistic lie.” In 1894, after Tchaikovsky’s death, Tolstoy summed up his opinion of the composer this way: “So-so, one of the average ones.”⁷

In October 1878, Tolstoy wrote to Turgenev in Paris, complaining that he had been suffering a “mental breakdown” of late, overcome by “a complex feeling in which the main part is shame and fear that people are laughing at me … it seems to me that you are laughing at me, too.” At the end, Tolstoy asked an unexpected question: “What is Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin? I haven’t heard it yet, but I am very interested.”⁸

Everything about this letter is curious—Tolstoy’s admission of his psychological vulnerability as well as his inexplicable interest in the latest work by a composer he so disliked (the piano score of the opera had just appeared).

In response, Turgenev, somewhat smugly, explained that although “some of your writing pleased me greatly, and others I did not like at all,” he had never laughed at them and expressed the rather ironic hope that Tolstoy’s “mental illness” had passed.

As for Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, he had already gotten the piano score and heard it performed by the singer Pauline Viardot:

It is without a doubt marvelous music; the lyrical, melodic parts are especially fine. But what a libretto! Just imagine, Pushkin’s descriptions of the protagonists are put into their mouths. For example, Pushkin says of Lensky: He sang of life’s end / At barely the age of 18, etc.

And in the opera, Lensky sings: I sing of life’s end, etc.

And it’s like that throughout.⁹

We know Tolstoy’s reaction to Turgenev’s letter from his own to his friend the poet Afanasy Fet: “Yesterday I received a letter from Turgenev, and decided to keep my distance from him. He’s such an unpleasant bully.” After that summary, the letter from the unpleasant bully should have sunk into oblivion. But no. Mysteriously, Turgenev’s review of the opera—and, interestingly, only the negative part, with the criticism of the libretto—instantly circulated throughout Moscow’s cultural circles.

The only person who could have given such publicity to Turgenev’s letter was Tolstoy himself. He was a master of manipulating public opinion. His wife once compared him to a spider catching wretched buzzing flies in his web. Tolstoy must have really enjoyed humiliating Tchaikovsky using Turgenev’s words.

The phenomenal speed with which the acidulous response traveled is explained by special circumstances. Music in Russia then (and now) played a marginal role compared to literature. But here was the opinion of one great writer in a letter to another about a new musical work based on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, one of the cornerstones of Russian culture. The opera was being rehearsed just then at the Moscow Conservatory under Nikolai Rubinstein. It was a readymade bit of gossip in a highbrow cultural wrapping, the best candy to relish in salons.

No one cared that the particular example Turgenev used to prove Tchaikovsky’s unforgivable distortion of Pushkin did not actually exist in the libretto. It was Turgenev’s error, made worse by his assertion that the whole libretto was like that. His accidental mistake, disseminated by Tolstoy, and thereby supported by his powerful authority, was about to undermine the reputation of the as yet unperformed opera (which was probably what Tolstoy intended) among the literature-centric Moscow public.

It had that effect, according to Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer’s brother, who was present at the premiere of Eugene Onegin on March 17, 1879. Modest recalled the “cold reception” from the public and tied it directly to the careless and unfair letter which “set the public against the composition” at the premiere. “The word ‘blasphemy’ raced around the audience. I remember hearing it several times that day.”¹⁰

The impression Turgenev’s letter made on newsmakers was so strong that even six years later, after the opera’s premiere at the Imperial Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1884, an influential journalist, Alexei Suvorin, quoted Turgenev in his review in the popular newspaper New Times.

Tchaikovsky was in a panic. He tried inviting Tolstoy to a Moscow performance of his opera, for him to see that there was no “blasphemy,” but Tolstoy ignored the invitation and later recalled, after the composer’s death, “I think he was hurt that I did not attend his Eugene Onegin.”

Trying to control the damage, Tchaikovsky literally dictated an article to a friendly music critic, which proclaimed that it was too easy “to dismiss the new opera with a few loud phrases about the profanation of Pushkin.”¹¹ Following Tchaikovsky’s prompting, the critic tried to explain both the innovative character of the work (not a traditional opera but “lyrical scenes,” as Tchaikovsky called it) and the unusual degree of the composer’s psychological identification with Pushkin’s characters.

The article could only hint at what is now well known. In the spring of 1877, Tchaikovsky received several letters from one Antonina Milyukova, twenty-eight, a former student of the Moscow Conservatory who had fallen in love with him. The letters made a profound impression on the thirty-eight-year-old composer who consequently wrote the opera based on Eugene Onegin, where the plot revolves around the letter written by the infatuated provincial girl Tatiana to the social dandy Onegin.

Pushkin has the cold Onegin reject the letter of the naive, emotional Tatiana. He, and therefore his readers, interpreted the rational Onegin’s attitude as a fatal mistake. Apparently, Tchaikovsky decided not to repeat Onegin’s error, and he responded to Milyukova’s letter and feelings. He married her.

It happened very quickly. Three months passed between her first letter and their wedding, and it ended in total disaster: right after the wedding, Tchaikovsky felt deep revulsion for his wife and eventually ran away.

No one doubts today that Tchaikovsky’s marriage influenced his composing Eugene Onegin. But why did the homosexual Tchaikovsky marry in the first place?

What exactly do we know about Tchaikovsky’s sexual orientation? As a young musician in the Soviet Union, I heard two oft-repeated rumors: one, that Tchaikovsky was homosexual, and two, that because he was, Alexander III (or his entourage) forced him to commit suicide.

The second rumor appears to have no solid documentary proof, while the number of accounts confirming the first rumor keeps growing. Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality can be now considered a proven fact, despite the continuing attempts in Russia to deny it.¹²

Certainly, Tchaikovsky’s sex life, like everyone’s, influenced his worldview and his work (and vice versa). However, it was kept in the closet and thus artificially separated from his artistic output. Now it has become clearer how his creative strategies were dictated by his sexual orientation. In the West, where scholars started writing about the sex life of geniuses and about Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality in particular long ago, there are two theories.

The first, which prevailed from the early twentieth century to the 1990s, depicted Tchaikovsky’s homosexual life in tsarist Russia in an exclusively tragic light. Allegedly, Tchaikovsky lived in constant fear of exposure, which would have destroyed his career and life (as happened, for example, in 1895 to Oscar Wilde in England). The composer, according to this theory, unsuccessfully attempted to rid himself of his “perversion,” suffered terribly, and therefore wrote tormented and “pathological” music.

This theory, accepted by music critics and many biographers, reflected the views of the mainstream majority that homosexuality was a “disease.” It suited Western music scholars, too, for it helped to explain what they interpreted as overheated “camp” emotiveness and “incorrectness” (as compared to the classical Austro-German symphonic tradition) of Tchaikovsky’s music.

But starting in the late 1990s, as a result of shifts in public opinion toward sexual minorities, the West (and particularly American academic circles) attempted a revisionist view of Tchaikovsky’s image as a homosexual.

According to this new interpretation, Tchaikovsky’s homosexual sex life, which began at the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence (where his classmates included such subsequently notorious homosexuals as Prince Vladimir Meshchersky and the poet Alexei Apukhtin), gradually settled down, and he was satisfied with it and even happy. It was an easy leap now to maintain that generally Tchaikovsky was “a reasonably happy man.”¹³

This version, which also forcefully refuted charges of hysteria and pathology in Tchaikovsky’s music, rested largely on two main considerations. First, its proponents claimed that Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century was, contrary to popular opinion, quite tolerant of homosexuality, having more in common with San Francisco a hundred years later than with contemporary Victorian London.

As proof, these American musicologists referred to the very kindly attitude of Alexander II, and then of Nicholas II, to Prince Meshchersky, a prominent conservative journalist of the era whose homosexuality was no secret in the highest circles of St. Petersburg.

The love of the Romanovs for Tchaikovsky goes without saying. Both Alexander III and his wife melted from his music. Alexander called Eugene Onegin his favorite opera. In 1888, the emperor awarded Tchaikovsky a lifetime pension of 3,000 rubles in silver annually.

Basically, the Romanovs perceived Tchaikovsky as their composer laureate, creating music for various ceremonial occasions (including a special cantata for the coronation of Alexander III) as well as church music at the emperor’s personal request. The familial love of Tchaikovsky’s music was passed on to Alexander III’s son, Nicholas II.

Another source for this new theory of Tchaikovsky as a happy person, especially in his later years, are the memoirs of people who knew him in that period and often saw him “animated and full of life.” Modest Tchaikovsky’s evidence has great weight in this regard; the composer’s younger brother wrote a fundamental biography, The Life of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, published in the early twentieth century. Modest stressed how “cheerful and lively” the composer was in his final days.

But Modest, author of the libretti for his brother’s operas Queen of Spades and Iolanthe—and, like his brother, a homosexual, as evinced in his frank unfinished autobiography—had an agenda. He wanted to refute, without saying so outright, the rumors of Tchaikovsky’s suicide, at that time already circulating in Russian musical circles; they were elicited in part by the fact that the composer’s last work was his tragic Sixth (“Pathétique”) Symphony, which many contemporaries considered a requiem for himself.

Modest, however, spoke of Tchaikovsky’s “hysteria” in the biography and noted his “out-of-the-ordinary nervousness,” adding, “according to some contemporary scientists, genius is a kind of psychosis.”¹⁴ (Modest was referring to the influential French psychiatrist of the period, Théodule Ribeaux, fashionable in Russia, too, who wrote in one of his popular works, “The character of hysterical patients can change like the pictures in a kaleidoscope … the most constant thing about them is their inconsistency. Yesterday they were cheerful, sweet, and polite; today they are gloomy, irritable, and inaccessible.”)¹⁵

Tchaikovsky’s doctor, Vassily Bertenson, also stressed the composer’s “extreme nervousness,” which forced him to lie awake at night “with the sense of overwhelming horror.”¹⁶ Lacking Prozac in those days, Tchaikovsky smoked “insatiably” (he had begun smoking at the age of fourteen), adding powerful doses of alcohol. According to Dr. Bertenson, the composer “abused cognac and there were periods, his brothers said, when he was on the verge of real alcoholism.”¹⁷

Alina Briullova, who was close to Tchaikovsky for many years, confirmed that “he truly was a man with sick nerves,” and had “a definite neurosis, that sometimes grew acute to the point of inexpressible suffering: a burning, causeless ennui, which he could not shake, an inability to control his jangling nerves, a fear of people … it tormented him terribly and poisoned his life.”¹⁸

The psychiatrist Ribeaux described this type as having “sudden flares of anger and indignation, uncontrolled delights, fits of despair, explosions of crazy merriment, impulses of strong attachment, unexpected moments of tenderness or fits of temper, during which they, like spoiled children, stamp their feet and break furniture.”

The best illustration for that page from a psychiatrist’s treatise is this excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s December 1877 letter to his brother Anatoly (first published by Valery Sokolov), describing the scene the composer made at his faithful servant, Alexei Safronov. “I suspected that there was something wrong with his genital member. I kept pestering him about how things were. He resisted. I suddenly grew furious, tore at my tie and shirt, broke a chair and so on. When I was indulging in these strange gymnastic exercises, my eyes suddenly met his. He was so terrified, he was looking at me so piteously, completely pale, he kept saying ‘What’s the matter with you, calm down,’ and so on, that I instantly did.”¹⁹

A nervous wreck (a modern diagnosis might be “borderline personality disorder”) certainly can enjoy moments and even long periods of happiness, but it would be quite a stretch to call him happy. A similar stretch is calling the attitude toward homosexuality in Tchaikovsky’s Russia tolerant.

Let’s look at the case of Prince Meshchersky, the favorite example of the modern-day Tchaikovsky “revisionists.” Yes, the Romanovs tolerated the openly homosexual Meshchersky (who, according to Alexander Poznansky, was Tchaikovsky’s “intimate friend”)²⁰ and supported his ultra-conservative publication, The Citizen, with generous government grants. But the Russian political elite seethed and kept looking for ways to open the eyes of Alexander III and then Nicholas II about Meshchersky.

Yevgeny Feoktistov, chief of the department overseeing press and publishing under Alexander III, recorded in his diary that Prince Meshchersky made “a very depressing impression on all decent people; his newspaper is considered the tsar’s; they said that it should serve as the mouthpiece of the Sovereign himself, and just as if on purpose, the disgusting story with some flutist or drummer came to light … How could I not mourn that the Sovereign, distinguished by an instinctive disgust for everything base and perverted, has given a man shamed in public opinion the chance to abuse his name?”²¹

Such diary entries, made by some of the most influential figures of the period, were quite common.²² Their hostile or mocking tone makes it clear: in a situation when sodomy was considered a crime (the Criminal Code read: “Anyone guilty of the unnatural act of sodomy is subject to being stripped of all rights and exiled to Siberia”), accusing someone of homosexuality was a potent weapon and was routinely used to discredit political enemies and for blackmail.

Homosexuals were under tight police surveillance in this period, as evidenced by an official memorandum of 1894 found in the archives of the minister of state property, Mikhail Ostrovsky (brother of the dramatist Alexander Ostrovsky, who was a friend of Tchaikovsky’s), which lists and describes the most notorious homosexuals in St. Petersburg (approximately seventy men), based on agent reports.²³ It says about Prince Meshchersky, “He uses young men, actors, and cadets and becomes their patron for it … To determine the qualities of the rear ends of his victims, he uses a billiards table.”²⁴

The author of the memorandum insisted that the government increase its war on homosexuality: “The consequences of this evil, which has apparently set deep roots in the capital, are varied and harmful to a high degree. Besides perverting public morality and public health, it is a particularly harmful influence on the family situation of young men, students of almost all educational institutions, and the discipline of the troops.”²⁵

The idea that society and law in Russia were easy on homosexuals is a myth. We also have to bear in mind the specific nature of laws in Russia—in every period. Public life there is based not on laws but on “understandings.” That means that formally existing laws are applied or ignored depending on the position and wishes of the authorities. An unknown peasant “sodomist” could be herded to Siberia in leg irons, but a member of the elite, like Prince Meshchersky, under the patronage of the emperor, could slip out of any dangerous situation.

No one could feel confident of the future in those conditions (which is one of the goals of a society built on “understandings”). That life—and not just for homosexuals—could not be called “happy.” That is why Herzen, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Mussorgsky (and many other contemporaries of Tchaikovsky from the artistic world) could hardly be described as “happy” people.

Tchaikovsky’s sense of a troubled existence, shared with the Russian intelligentsia as a class, was exacerbated by his mental instability and, of course, belonging to an ostracized sexual minority. In other words, Tchaikovsky was unhappy not because he was homosexual but because he was a neurasthenic Russian intellectual at a critical juncture in history, and a homosexual to boot.

This is clear from Tchaikovsky’s letter of January 1878 to Nikolai Rubinstein, in which he declines a flattering invitation to travel to the World’s Fair in Paris as a representative of Russia. “In Paris, I would start to suspect every new acquaintance, and I would have many there, of knowing about me what I have been trying to hide so hard for so long. All right, I’m sick, I’m crazy, but now I can’t live anywhere where I have to appear, be prominent, or call attention to myself.”²⁶

Tchaikovsky’s hasty marriage to Milyukova represented, in fact, a way out and a cover—as it has been before and since for countless gay men who were forced to adjust to a hostile society. What complicated the situation for Tchaikovsky was that, even though he had a mind “with a large dose of humor and not without sarcasm,” he was still first and foremost a hyperexcitable composer of genius.

He could not just conveniently take a wealthy wife, as did one of his gay friends, Vladimir Shilovsky. (Yet even the bon vivant Shilovsky had difficulties with the marriage, as Tchaikovsky informed his brother Modest: “Shilovsky’s wedding has taken place. He boozed with no sleep, bawling and fainting all the time. Now he is completely happy and satisfied. He penetrated his wife [that is the complete truth] and he spends his days calling on aristocrats.”)²⁷

Tchaikovsky sublimated his emotions in music. It was his curse and his blessing, as it usually is with every creative personality, regardless of sexual orientation. Unable “to penetrate” Milyukova (from another letter to Modest: “The deflowering did not take place … But I have set myself up in such a way that there is no need to worry about that”)²⁸, the composer wrote Eugene Onegin.

The autobiographical nature of the opera in view of Tchaikovsky’s circumstances seems obvious. But it manifests itself not where earlier scholars had sought it, naively assuming that Tatiana was inspired by Milyukova, who had written love letters to Tchaikovsky. In fact, Tatiana is Tchaikovsky himself.

Freud believed that the hysterical personality is constantly playing out a role of the other—woman as male and man as female. The borderline personality is always breaking out of the framework of its gender. In Tchaikovsky’s case, this was heightened by his creative impulse and also his homosexuality.

Expanding the gender field for his self-expression, Tchaikovsky appropriated Milyukova’s behavior and letters. (Sokolov points out that even after he left Milyukova, Tchaikovsky continued using her letters as material for his work: the lyrics of at least one song in his vocal cycle op. 60 are a paraphrase of her words.) It was no accident that he began working on the opera with the episode in which Tatiana writes to Onegin. That scene is one of the opera’s emotional and musical peaks. Tatiana’s “gasp” as she anxiously awaits Onegin’s response—“O my God! How miserable, how pathetic am I!”—is Tchaikovsky’s emotion.

Tchaikovsky’s strategy in Eugene Onegin is complex: his autobiographical “I” is divided into the shy but strong Tatiana and the fiery but elegiac young poet Lensky.²⁹ Turgenev was the first to note that Lensky in the opera is a much more formidable presence than in the work by Pushkin, who treated Lensky sympathetically but with irony. Tchaikovsky, contrary to widespread presumption, could be ironic in his music. But there isn’t a trace of irony in his attitude toward Lensky. He admires him. Where Pushkin saw reason for mockery, Tchaikovsky elevates Lensky to a tragic pedestal.

The best example of this is Lensky’s aria before his duel with Onegin. Pushkin makes Lensky’s poem before his death a parody of the Romantic clichés of the time, but there is no parody in the music. The aria is the most popular number in the opera and the most famous tenor aria in Russian music. (I doubt Pushkin could have imagined such a rendering of his parody.)

Tchaikovsky accomplished this radical emotional transformation of Pushkin’s text because of his identification with Lensky. For Tchaikovsky, Lensky is the victim par excellence, which was how he saw himself.

The choreographer George Balanchine, who came from the old St. Petersburg and had known people who had been Tchaikovsky’s friends, often told me that the composer considered himself a martyr, the victim of society that rejected and persecuted his sexual orientation, this essential component of his ego.³⁰ This was also the posthumous perception of Tchaikovsky’s image in Russian intellectual circles, succinctly summarized by Boris Asafyev, the best authority on the composer’s works: “Tchaikovsky, finally, was a martyr.”³¹

Describing Lensky, Pushkin tosses away a line that for Tchaikovsky could have been the key to his identification with Lensky; the poet mentions Lensky’s “fear of vice and shame.” The composer wrote about Lensky to Nadezhda von Meck: “Isn’t the death of an enormously talented young man over a fatal confrontation with society’s view of honor profoundly dramatic and touching?”

In Tchaikovsky’s opera the real “couple” is not Onegin and Tatiana, whose love is the center of Pushkin’s narrative, but Tatiana and Lensky.

According to Tchaikovsky, Lensky’s death is the consequence and result of his “otherness,” and Tatiana survives only because she submits to the dictates of high society and “bon ton,” even though that brings her to a spiritual breakdown.

This is a George Sandian interpretation of Pushkin’s work, coming via Herzen and Turgenev, whom the composer admired and read avidly. That is why Turgenev had reacted so sensitively to Tchaikovsky’s innovative promotion of Lensky to major protagonist (less perceptive contemporaries did not notice this radical shift).

Transforming Pushkin’s work into a Turgenevian novel with a hidden agenda, Tchaikovsky feared that his Onegin was doomed to remain a work “for a few” (although, like every author, he hoped for a miracle). The miracle took place: this was the opera that made Tchaikovsky the most popular Russian composer.

It happened gradually. First the Russian public bought the piano scores of Onegin. The demand for the sheet music grew steadily as more amateur singers began to study excerpts from the opera—primarily, Tatiana’s letter scene and Lensky’s aria before the duel. A typical reaction is in von Meck’s letter of September 24, 1883, to Tchaikovsky: “When I hear the duel scene on the piano, I cannot express in words what I feel. I come to a state where I can only say, ‘Ah, I can’t take it anymore!’ whereas when I read the same scene in Pushkin, I merely say, ‘Poor little Lensky!’ ”

Eugene Onegin started to sell out every performance. The box office success increased the number of new productions. The opera became the absolute champion on every index: popular love of Russian audiences, number of performances, and, subsequently, critical esteem. By now it could be said that Tchaikovsky’s interpretation is more entrenched than Pushkin’s original approach. Thus, Tolstoy’s attempt to nip the success of this opera in the bud failed, adding to the eternal quandary: how is the cultural canon formed, and who plays the more important role in the process—the experts or the consumers?

PART V

CHAPTER 12

Dostoevsky and the Romanovs

On Monday, April 4, 1866, Emperor Alexander II took his customary stroll in St. Petersburg’s Summer Garden. He liked his daily constitutional, perhaps imitating his father, Nicholas I. Besides the obvious health benefits, it gave the forty-seven-year-old ruler, tall and stately, with mustache and lush sideburns and slightly bulging eyes with a gentle gaze, a sense of unity with his people. He was not accompanied by retinue or bodyguards.

After his walk, Alexander headed toward his waiting carriage at the Summer Garden entrance. A pistol shot rang out from the crowd of gawkers. The assailant was a young student, Dmitri Karakozov, who belonged to a secret revolutionary society. He missed (he had an ancient double-barreled pistol), but the bullet whizzed by so close that it burned the emperor’s military cap.

The terrorist was instantly captured. Alexander came up to him and asked, “Who are you?” The student replied, “I am a Russian.” Then, turning to the stunned people around him, he shouted, “Folks, I shot for you!”

Alexander immediately went to the Kazan Cathedral, where a service of thanksgiving for his miraculous salvation was held. Then he returned to the Winter Palace. The investigative machine was set in motion, to dig up the roots of this unprecedented act of terrorism in Russia.

It seemed incredible that a Russian could lift his hand against the monarch, anointed by God. The authorities and the public at first assumed that the conspiracy was headed by Poles, who were constantly rebelling and demanding separation from Russia. (The most recent uprising had been cruelly suppressed by Alexander II in 1863.) Hence Alexander’s question to the assailant.

The masses rejoiced that the tsar was unharmed and cursed the foreign Poles. At the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the scheduled ballet, The Pharaoh’s Daughter, was replaced by a special performance of Glinka’s 1836 classic opera, A Life for the Tsar, in which the peasant Ivan Susanin heroically saved the founder of the Romanov dynasty, Tsar Mikhail, from the villainous Poles in 1613.

Tchaikovsky was at the Bolshoi that night and he wrote to his family,

I think the Moscow audience went beyond the bounds of sense in their outburst of enthusiasm. The opera was not really performed, for as soon as the Poles appeared onstage, the whole theater shouted, “Down with the Poles!” and so on. In the last scene of Act 4, when the Poles are supposed to kill Susanin, the actor playing him started fighting the chorus members who played Poles, and being very strong, knocked down several of them, while the rest of the extras, seeing that the audience approved this mockery of art, truth, and decency, fell down, and the triumphant Susanin left unharmed, brandishing his arms, to the deafening applause of the Muscovites.¹

In an attempt to maximize the propaganda windfall, the authorities decided to create a “new Susanin,” so as to promote loyalty to the tsar. They picked a young peasant, Osip Komissarov, who happened to have been near the terrorist attacking Alexander II. The police announced that Komissarov had pushed Karakozov’s elbow just when he pulled the trigger, thereby saving the tsar. The new myth benefited from the fact that Komissarov, like the legendary Susanin, came from Kostroma Province, thus creating a direct line between the two heroic promonarchist exploits, separated by two and a half centuries.

Komissarov was presented to Alexander II at the Winter Palace, and to the cries of “Hurrah!” from the staff he was embraced by the emperor and elevated to the nobility, becoming Komissarov-Kostromskoy. General Petr Cherevin, in charge of the Karakozov investigation, cynically noted in his diary, which was published posthumously, “I find it quite politic to invent such an exploit; it is a forgivable fabrication and one that influences the masses beneficially.”²

It is difficult to imagine the psychological shock Alexander II experienced after this totally unexpected attempt on his life. The emperor sincerely believed himself to be the people’s benefactor, and for good reason: five years earlier, on February 19, 1861, he signed the greatest progressive act in Russian history, the Manifesto of Emancipation of the serfs.

This historic decision, in a stroke of a pen moving Russia from a feudal state to the new era, was one toward which Alexander (later often accused of indecisiveness) had moved stubbornly from his accession to the throne in 1855, sweeping aside doubts, arguments, and even direct resistance from both the right and the left. His severe father, Nicholas I, never did take such a bold step.

The people hailed the manifesto at first. (The authorities feared that the tsar’s ukase would lead to drunkenness and then disorder in the villages, but that did not happen.) In gratitude, they called Alexander the Tsar Liberator. He considered the day of emancipation the best of his life: “I have the sense that I fulfilled a great duty.”

Even the intellectual elite (a stratum traditionally given to skepticism) felt that an event of extraordinary significance had occurred. Alexander Nikitenko, a professor at St. Petersburg University, read that “precious” manifesto aloud to his wife and children in his study beneath a portrait of Alexander II, “which we regarded with profound reverence and gratitude”³ (as he recorded in his diary).

The great poet and editor of the leftist journal Contemporary Nikolai Nekrasov, in his poem “Freedom,” addressed an imagined peasant infant, “God is merciful! You will not know tears!” He called upon his fellow writers, “O Muse! Greet freedom with hope!” Even the implacable opponent of autocracy, the revolutionary émigré Herzen, doffed his metaphorical cap to Alexander II: “You have won, Galilean.”